Another of the sergeants, a really skilled workman, and fired by the actual boat having been floated, in conjunction with the builder of the first one, resolved to make a real wherry. This they did from various drawings, and they succeeded in building a very handsome boat, having curved planks, which were bent with great trouble with hot water. This boat was also fastened with copper rivets, and really handsomely finished; but though so light that three men could carry it, it held two comfortably, and would probably have been speedy, but it was so terribly crank that no one would venture in it; and though it was ballasted till the gunwale was almost level with the water, it turned over on the slightest movement. This, the second and last boat built by the English in Shiraz, is also at the bottom of one of the tanks. At Ispahan an extraordinary barge was made afterwards by two of the staff for the Zil-es-Sultan, and this could be rowed; but it was a barge, and had no pretensions to be called a boat. I now started a dog-cart, which I received from Kurrachee, intending it for Ispahan, where there are _good_ roads; as fate would have it, when the thing arrived I had been stationed at Shiraz, where there were next to _no_ roads. I put my trap together with some difficulty, for the wood had warped in the long land journey, and found it to be a big dog-cart of the largest, heaviest, and (luckily) strongest type. Its weight appalled us all. Followed by a crowd, our servants dragged it outside the city gates, and I put my chestnut horse in. Of course, he had never been in the shafts before. On attempting to urge him forward he sat down, as a dog sits, and declined to stir; this manœuvre he constantly repeated. I now in despair tried an old and valueless grey horse. He walked off with the machine at once, and, barring the want of roads, I had no difficulty. Luckily, the trap was built of a solidity I have never seen, save in railway carriages, and so, regardless of roads, I was able to go about. The stony bed of the river, with an occasional bit of hard road, and thence to the sandy plain of Jaffir-a-bad, was about the only drive. Here, and here only in the neighbourhood of Shiraz, one sees enormous tarantulas. These beasts, some with bodies as large as a pigeon’s egg and legs in proportion, are very brave; when attacked with a stick, instead of taking flight, they advance threateningly at the person who molests them, and attempt to bite the stick; they are really formidable-looking brutes, covered with brown hair.