'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎344] (393/714)

PERSIA
village of Zargandeh, a little to the north-west of Gulahek, for
which they claim analogous privileges. The French lease a resi
dence at Tejrish, a mile higher up the mountain, where, in the
court of an imamzadeh, is what claims to be the largest chenar in
ersia. The Turks own grounds in the same neighbourhood. The
Germans were till recently tenants of the English in Gulahek,
and now live at Dizashub. The Austrians are leaseholders at
Rustamabad.
Before I quit the northern outskirts of Teheran I must pay
the tribute of one more parting paragraph to the mighty mouutain-
n sentinel Demavend. The shapely white cone, cutting so
Demavend i i • i • i-
keenly and so high into the air, becomes so familiar and
cherished a figure in the daily landscape, that on leaving Teheran
and losing sight thereof (which, if he be journeying in a southerly
direction, he does not do for 1 60 miles), the traveller is conscious of
a very perceptible void. Demavend is a volcano, not, as some have
said, wholly extinct, but rather in a state of suspended animation.
There is no record of eruption during the historic period, but
columns of smoke are sometimes seen to ascend from the fissures,
particularly from the Dud-i-Kuh (or Smoky Peak) on the southern
side. It is very strange that no mention is made of the mountain
by Chardin, whose keen vision overlooked but little; or by Pietro
della Valle, Avho passed almost at its base. Hanway, in 1744,
speaks of it as ' the great mountain Demoan on which the Persians
say that the Ark rested.' The first to accomplish the ascent—the
Persians having always believed and declared, like the Armenians
in the case of Ararat, that it was not to be climbed by mortal man
—w T as Mr., afterwards Sir, W. T. Thomson, in 1836. The French
naturalist, Aucher Eloy, met Thomson coming down from the top,
and himself ascended a few days later. Since that date Demavend
has been frequently ascended by members of the various Legations
in Teheran, the climb being neither difficult nor dangerous, but
intensely fatiguing. For long an irreconcilable divergence between
the trigonometrical and other calculations of its height, arrived at
by different travellers or men of science, prevailed, the estimates
ranging from 14,600 to 21,500 feet. General Schindler, as the
result of a combined trigonometrical and barometrical measurement,
gives the true altitude as 19,400 feet. 1 From the summit, which
1 ' Notes on Demavend,' from Proceedings of the R.G.S. (new series), vol. s.
pp. 85-89 (1888); vide also 'Accounts of Ascent,' by W. T. Thomson, in 1836,