Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/176

 86 ON THE CASPIAN TO PES SI A

and how it had been rewarded by the monarch with the crested crown it ever wears as a souvenir of its successful mission.

The bridge over a little river whose mournful name means the 'Dead Bride' awakened fancy enough to appreciate the various legends connected with it, one of which told how she had been swept away by the stream when returning at the head of her wedding procession ; but brighter associations were ranged about the stream of Nau-Rud, where in bygone days a kindly old woman, with winning smile, used to sell eggs to the wayfarers as they crossed the bridge, so that memories of her genial spirit still live in the name of Murghanah Purd, * Hen's Egg Bridge.'

During the whole ride we had been passing through field after field of rice, flooded in water to the depth of a foot or more, and forming a very cesspool of malaria. Here the wretched peasants labor ankle-deep in the miry water day after day during the planting and harvesting season of this staple, which gives them their slender subsistence. In every direction were to be seen women at work the livelong day, their red cotton garments, not skirts, tucked up like trousers as they stooped to weed or transplant the young rice-shoots in the filthy mire, while the men plowed up the wet ooze with rude bullock-drawn plows. According to most accounts the moral status of this miserable folk is as degraded as their low means of livelihood. No wonder is it that the children look sickly and puny, when they are said to be brought up from babyhood on doses of opium, administered to bring sleep while the mother labors in the dank fields, or while the father may be wasting his paltry earnings in the tea-house, the Persian sub- stitute for the saloon, generally accompanied by facilities for the use of tobacco and opium. Sometimes it happens that the joint winnings of the household are swept away when the swollen streams break the dikes of the rice-fields, rushing over a wide area, and utterly destroying the crops, as we witnessed that very day.

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