Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/175

 equivalent of the latter name) line the way ; a fox starts out of the thicket, showing how unexpected was the intrusion into his domain; the thatched dwellings that are typical of Gilan announce that we are approaching the district where the rice- workers dwell ; and the bar of a toll-gate tells that the road is in the hands of Russian collectors.

A hearty welcome awaited us at Rasht, where I found the British Vice-Consul, Mr. H. L. Rabino, whom it has been my pleasant privilege to visit on each journey to Persia. A dinner party does not count as a specially noteworthy incident in Europe or America ; but a dinner party in Persia, when one has roughed it on the road for days or is to rough it for weeks to come, lingers in memory as a special occasion on which to look back.

I may be allowed to digress here, so as to describe a two days' journey through the Province of Gilan to the town of Lahijan. I knew that there was a shrine there, which is said to have been dedicated in olden times to the worship of Ormazd, and I was, therefore, naturally most anxious to visit the place. The preparations for such an outing involved no slight activity on the part of the servants as well as ourselves, with renewed visits to the bazaars in order to purchase the needed parapher- nalia, for traveling off the route or on the route in Persia means always much ado. But all was ultimately made ready for an early start not long after the sun was up.

As we rode out through Rasht into the country, I was struck by the wan cheeks of the children, which showed the searing effect of the fever that ever prevails in this region, where the mountains precipitate the moisture from the Caspian, and turn these low-lying lands into a hotbed of miasma in summer. Yet this note of unpleasant impression was soon turned into har- mony by the singing of the birds, for the hulhul was ringing out its nightingale strains, and the hudhud, or hoopoo, perched on some vine-clad stump amid the semi-tropical vegetation, told with a gentle plaintiveness how it served King Solomon as a messenger of love in his wooing of Bilkis, the Queen of Sheba,

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