Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎32r] (63/118)

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February, 1943 to open up the Consulate first established in the 1914-18 war.
This would put me about nine miles from the Naval Officer in Charge, Hormuz at
his convoy assembly point offshore near Qishm island. I could also be in
touch with the local Persian authorities and as far as possible keep an eye on
the 550 miles of coastline from Bandar Abbas eastwards to the Indian border. In
pointing out to Delhi and Teheran that this was a tall order Sir Geoffrey Prior,
the Political Resident A senior ranking political representative (equivalent to a Consul General) from the diplomatic corps of the Government of India or one of its subordinate provincial governments, in charge of a Political Residency. now back in the Gulf from his spell in Cairo, estimated
that the distance involved was equal to the English Channel from Ushant to the
German border.
My journey to Bandar Abbas by road from Bushire underlined the poorness of
land communications along the north coast of the Gulf. The first leg was to
Yezd, four hundred miles inland to the north. It was the last stronghold of the
Zoroastrian religion and its many tall wind-towers bringing cooler air down to
underground rooms were distinctive as were the best preserved city walls in the
country, partly built by Timur the Great. The local accent reminded the oriental
scholar Edward Browne of the singsong dialect of my Tyneside birthplace. I had
to admit a curious similarity and from time to time since I am given to putting
on a Yezdi accent for the amusement of Persians. Turning south-east at a right
angle for the two hundred and fifty miles stretch to Kerman I passed some of
Persia's longest qanats or underground water channels devised 2000 years before
to bring water long distances from snow-covered mountains and allow cultivated
settlements in dry valleys. According to Robert Byron, it was calculated by
perhaps the greatest Persian expert of the Political Service y Lt. Col. E.W.C. Noel,
that one-third of the adult male population of the country worked on the building
and maintenance of qanats. Their steady gradient over many miles is achieved
without benefit of instruments and there are entry shafts for repair every fifty
to one hundred yards. In Kerman the Consul, Arthur (H.A.N.) Barlow, was a Political
Officer who was later to be my Political Agent A mid-ranking political representative (equivalent to a Consul) from the diplomatic corps of the Government of India or one of its subordinate provincial governments, in charge of a Political Agency. in Quetta before I took over from him.