ong both towards and away from the city gate. The dust is appalling.
There is nothing more tantalizing than the long stretches of
uninteresting country to be traversed in Persia, where, much as one
tries, there is nothing to rest one's eye upon; so it is with great
relief--almost joy--that we come now to something new in the scenery, in
the shape of architecture--a great number of most peculiar towers.

[Illustration: Agriculture and Pigeon Towers near Isfahan.]

These are the pigeon towers--a great institution in Central Persia. They
are cylindrical in shape, with castellated top, and are solidly built
with massive walls. They stand no less than thirty to forty feet in
height, and possess a central well in which the guano is collected--the
object for which the towers are erected. A quadrangular house on the top,
and innumerable small cells, where pigeons lay their eggs and breed their
young, are constructed all round the tower. These towers are quite
formidable looking structures, and are so numerous, particularly in the
neighbourhood of Isfahan, as to give the country quite a strongly
fortified appearance. The guano is removed once a year. After passing
Khorasgun, at Ghiavaz--a small village--one could count as many as
twenty-four of these pigeon houses.

Some amusement could be got from the way the Persian telegraph line had
been laid between Isfahan and Yezd, _via_ Nain. There were no two poles
of the same height or shape; some were five or six feet long, others ten
or fifteen;--some were straight, some crooked; some of most irregular
knobby shapes. As to the wire, when it did happen to be supported on the
pole it was not fastened to an insulator, as one would expect, but merely
rested on a nail, or in an indentation in the wood. For hundreds of yards
at a time the wire lay on the ground, and the poles rested by its side or
across it. Telegrams sent by these Persian lines, I was told, take
several days to reach their destination, if they ever do reach at all;
and are usually entrusted for conveyance, not to the wire, but to caravan
men happening to travel in that particular direction, or to messengers
specially despatched from one city to the other.

Some two farsakhs from Isfahan we went through a passage where the hills
nearly meet, after which we entered a flat plain, barren and ugly. In the
distance to the south-east lay a line of blackish trees, and another in
front of us in the direction we were travelling,