A wide paved chaussée leads to the gate of the royal garden, now merely a meadow with trees. At the entrance is the Lion and Sun daubed in staring colours on a plastered wall, and here, unless known to the sentries, one is not allowed to pass. My professional work having made me free of the place, we pass on, and leaving the Chehel Sitūn, or hall of the forty columns, crowded with the hangers-on of the minister, who here adjudicates with local grandees on minor affairs, we come, passing a huge hauz or tank full of clear water, to a wall in which are two recesses having life-sized portraits in oil of former Ispahan magnates, evidently good likenesses and not without merit. On the right is the principal entrance to the quarters of audience of the minister and various antechambers. We dismount, pass through a small door, are saluted by the sentry, and enter a well-kept Persian garden, the paved walks of which are fenced off, with telegraph wire and painted posts, from the sunken beds. Here, too, everything is in good repair, for we are now in the outer courtyard of his Royal Highness the Zil-es-Sultan, Governor of one-third of Persia, the eldest son of the king, a man of genius, and in high favour; in fact, at present (1883) the most powerful of his Majesty’s subjects, if we except the Valliāt, or heir-apparent, a priest-ridden ascetic of weak intellect, whom the royal policy, which points to the survival of the fittest, will probably quietly remove, in which case the Zil-es-Sultan will surely reign. Here all who are expecting an audience of his Royal Highness or his people, wait; great men and their servants, merchants, artisans, priests, veiled women, wrestlers; a few well-dressed servants of the prince swagger about, while his carpet-spreaders, or farrashes, with long sticks, are present to keep order or administer the bastinado; a few executioners, dressed in red, and shunned save by the lowest, skulk in one corner, while half-a-dozen Jews gesticulate and shake their fists in each other’s faces in another. Rooms at the side, open to the air, show mirzas in long cloaks, busily writing official letters or making out accounts. Close to the door, which is covered with a curtain, on which is painted a colossal sentry on guard, stands a sentinel, and here lounges the big moustached doorkeeper with his huge silver mace. The farrash-bashi here, too, is waiting a summons, with two villagers in shirt and drawers of blue cotton, and felt hats: they are chained, probably on a charge of highway robbery, or a still more heinous crime in Persia, backwardness with their taxes. They don’t seem comfortable, for they know that a gesture from his Royal Highness will consign them either to the tender mercies of the executioners, or the bastinado of the farrashes, or even perhaps immediate liberty.