'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎255] (294/714)

FROM MESHED TO TEHERAN 256
from which strangers can afford to abstain. Perhaps I shall not
inaptly conclude this digression upon the Persian post-horse and
postal system if I quote the sententious observation with which
Tavermer prefaced his Persian travels more than three centuries
' A man cannot travel in Asia as they do in Europe ; nor at the same
hours, nor with the same ease.'
. Tlie road from Meslie(:1 t0 Teheran is one whose intrinsic attrac
tion is so small that no one would ever be found to traverse it but for
General tlie necess ity of getting from one place to the other For
character the entire distance of 560 miles there is scarcely a single
object of beauty, and but few of interest. The scenery
at any rate in the late autumn, is colourless and desolate. The
road, or rather track, winds over long, stony plains, across unlovelv
mountains, and through deserted villages and towns. There is
frequent and abundant evidence that the country traversed was
once far more densely or less sparsely populated, and for that reason
more carefully tended, than it is at present. The traveller passes
towns which have been entirely abandoned, and display only a melan
choly confusion of tottering walls and fallen towers. He observes
citadels and fortified posts which have crumbled into irretrievable
decay, and are now little more than shapeless heaps of mud. He
sees long lines of choked and disused kanats, the shafts of the
underground wells by which water was once brought to the
lands from the mountains. The walls of the cities are in ruins and
exhibit yawning gaps; the few public buildings of any note are
railing to pieces; rows of former dwellings have been abandoned
to dust-heaps and dogs. The dirty, desecrated cemeteries that
btretch for hundreds of yards outside every town of any size, in
which the tombstones are defaced and the graves falling in, are not
more lugubrious in appearance than is the interior, where the living
seem to be in almost as forlorn a plight as the dead. The utmost
that the traveller can expect in the way of incident—an expectation
in which I have already said that I was disappointed—is that his
chapar horse should tumble down, to break, if not its own knees,
at any rate the paralysing monotony of the journey.
'But though the route be thus devoid of external attraction, it
has a twofold interest, historical and practical. The traveller is not
Its lessons mer< % pursuing the track that has been worn by count-
_ less thousands of pilgrims for at least 500 years, but he
is following the stormy wake of armies, and treading in the foot-