ay back to his
consular post at Tabreez. But just at this juncture the Russian minister
advised another plan. In order to save time, he said, we might proceed to
Meshed at once, and if our permission was not telegraphed to us at that
point, we could then turn south to Baluchistan as a last resort. This, our
friends unanimously declared, was a Muscovite trick to evade an absolute
refusal. The Russians, they assured us, would never permit a foreign
inspection of their doings on the Afghan border; and furthermore, we would
never be able to cross the uninhabited deserts of Baluchistan. Against all
protest, we waved "farewell" to the foreign and native throng which had
assembled to see us off, and on October 5 wheeled out of the fortified
square on the "Pilgrim Road to Meshed."

Before us now lay six hundred miles of barren hills, swampy _kevirs_,
brier-covered wastes, and salty deserts, with here and there some
kanot-fed oases. To the south lay the lifeless desert of Luth, the
"Persian Sahara," the humidity of which is the lowest yet recorded on the
face of the globe, and compared with which "the Gobi of China and the
Kizil-Kum of central Asia are fertile regions." It is our extended and
rather unique experience on the former of these two that prompts us to
refrain from further description of desert travel here, where the
hardships were in a measure ameliorated by frequent stations, and by the
use of cucumbers and pomegranates, both of which we carried with us on the
long desert stretches. Melons, too, the finest we have ever seen in any
land, frequently obviated the necessity of drinking the strongly brackish
water.

[Illustration: LEAVING TEHERAN FOR MESHED.]

Yet this experience was sufficient to impress us with the fact that the
national poets, Hafiz and Sadi, like Thomas Moore, have sought in fancy
what the land of Iran denied them. Those "spicy groves, echoing with the
nightingale's song," those "rosy bowers and purling brooks," on the whole
exist, so far as our experience goes, only in the poet's dream.

Leaving on the right the sand-swept ruins of Veramin, that capital of
Persia before Teheran was even thought of, we traversed the pass of
Sir-Dara, identified by some as the famous "Caspian Gate," and early in
the evening entered the village of Aradan. The usual crowd hemmed us in on
all sides, yelling, "Min, min!" ("Ride, ride!"), which took the place of
the Turkish refrain of "Bin, bin!" As we rode toward the