'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎66] (97/714)

PERSIA
time for months, the luxury of sheets, and forgets his hardships
over the congratulatory glass of champagne. Here, for instance,
at the time of my visit, were collected a young French vicomte,
fresh from the slaughter of ovis poli in the Tian Shan Mountains
upon the Mongolian frontier; a high official of the Anglo-
European Telegraph Department in Persia; an Irish engineer
employed on the Transcaspian Railway ; the Polish contractor who
built the famous wooden bridge over the Oxus; two English
sportsmen fresh from a hunting expedition amid the glaciers of
the. Caucasus ; as well as Russians, Armenians, and the polyglot
crowd that is always to be found upon the fringe of civilisation.
Dragomans, who have accompanied eminent travellers and have
left their names in well-known books, loiter about the doorway
and present their travel-worn letters of recommendation. Clearly,
as I write at home, can I recollect the emotions of anticipation,
half hesitating and half confident, with which I have more than
once started from the threshold of the Hotel de Londres ; no less
than the satisfaction with which, my purpose accomplished, I have
at a later date re-entered its doors.
After three days' stay I was not sorry to leave Tiflis, the more
so as some enterprising Tiflite took advantage of my parting
Departure nioments at the station to relieve me of a porte-monnaie,
from Tiflis containing 10/. in roubles. Considering, however, that
the hour when the train starts is about midnight, and that the
vovaarer seldom sets off without a wait of nearly two hours in the
t/ O O v
midst of a packed and constitutionally predatory crowd, I regarded
myself as having purchased at a reasonable price the privilege of
departure, and turned my back without annoyance upon the
amenities of the West.
Baku, with its chimneys and cisterns and refineries, with its
acres of rails outside the station covered with tank-cars, its grimy
naphtha-besprinkled streets, its sky-high telegraph poles
and rattling tramcars, its shops for every article under
the sun, its Persian ruins and its modern one-storeyed houses, its
shabby conglomeration of peoples, its inky harbour, its canopy of
smoke, and its all-pervading smells—Baku, larger, more pungent,
and less inviting than ever, was reached on the evening of the day
after I had left Tiflis. The population is now estimated at no less
than 90,000, a growth which is almost wholly that of the last
fifteen years, and is the exclusive creation of the petroleum