Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎37r] (73/118)

I escaped heat-stroke that day in a small grove of date palms with a slim
'jube' or irrigation channel in which I could lie, if only on my side to
avoid damming it. I remembered it well when reading the 20 year old Sir Thomas
Herbert, attache to our Ambassador to Persia in 1626, on Bandar Abbas. "Such
was the heat", he wrote, "that the inhabitants lay naked in troughs filled with
water".
Indeed the Persian's idea of a garden is scarcely much grander than a shady
grove. The presence of great deserts around him makes him content with some
shade and running water. These and a protective earth wall were given the name
of 'pairidaeza' in Old Persian which has come down to us as paradise. Of that
I fancy I had some small foretaste in my 'jube' near Minab and lacked only a
coconut from far Bengal to cut open and drink. For the dates of the grove had
been picked and the few poor specimens left were far past their first green
succulence and near the inferior taste of the brown boxed dates in British shops.
Another journey north east to Basidu (a British coaling station until as late
as 1935), Henjam and Lingan was made to contact local authorities, discourage
possible succour of the enemy and report back what could be done with rough
tracks as motorable roads or with flat areas and firm sea strand as landing
strips if the war reached southwards from the Caucasus. I found some potential
strips but the dreadful rocky tracks I could not negotiate in a jeep would need
a small army of sappers to make serviceable. But even my modest showing of the
flag was useful when magnified by local report. Major-General Dunsterville of
Dunsterforce when in Hamadan in 1918 found "the strength of his position much
improved by the Persian habit of exaggeration". A report he intercepted had it
that he commanded a considerable army when 240 miles of road between Kermanshah
and Qazvin was in fact held by twelve officers, two clerks, an armoured car and an
assortment of drivers. In my case I could perhaps hope that my driver and myself
would be multiplied to the strength of a platoon.