Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of Travel — John Shaqi
Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of TravelBell, Gertrude Lowthian
Science
Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of Travel
Bell, Gertrude Lowthian
Iran -- Description and travel
their distant resting-place, sowing not improbably the seeds of a fresh
outbreak as they go. The wonder is, not that the cholera should prove
fatal to so many, but that so large a proportion of the population
should survive in a land where Ignorance is for ever preparing a smooth
highway for the feet of Death.
_DWELLERS IN TENTS_
EVERY man, says a philosopher, is a wanderer at heart. Alas! I fear
the axiom would be truer if he had confined himself to stating that
every man loves to fancy himself a wanderer, for when it comes to the
point there is not one in a thousand who can throw off the ties of
civilized existence--the ties and the comforts of habits which have
become easy to him by long use, of the life whose security is ample
compensation for its monotony. Yet there are moments when the cabined
spirit longs for liberty. A man stands a-tiptoe on the verge of the
unknown world which lures him with its vague promises; the peaceful
years behind lose all their value in his dazzled eyes; like him, ‘qui
n’a pas du ciel que ce qui brille par le trou du volet,’ he pines to
stand in the great free sunlight, the great wide world which is all too
narrow for his adventurous energy. For one brief moment he shakes off
the traditions of a lifetime, swept away by the mighty current which
silently, darkly, goes watering the roots of his race. He, too, is a
wanderer like his remote forefathers; his heart beats time with the
hearts long stilled that dwelt in their bosoms, who came sweeping out
of the mysterious East, pressing ever resistlessly onward till the grim
waste of Atlantic waters bade them stay. He remembers the look of the
boundless plain stretching before him, the nights when the dome of the
sky was his ceiling, when he was awakened by the cold kisses of the
wind that flies before the dawn. He cries for space to fling out his
fighting arm; he burns to measure himself unfettered with the forces of
God.
Many hundreds of miles away, to the southward of the Caspian Sea,
lies a country still untraversed by highroad or railway line. Here
rise mountains clothed in the spring with a gay mantle of crocuses and
wild tulips, but on whose scorched sides the burning summer sun leaves
nothing but a low growth of thorns; here are steep valleys, where the
shadows fall early and rise late, strewn with rocks, crowned with
fantastic crags, scarred with deep watercourses; here the hawks hover,
the eagle passes with mournful cry, and the prisoned wind dashes madly
through the gorge. Here lie reaches of plain bounded on all sides by
the mountain wall, plateau after thorny plateau--a rolling wilderness
over which the headlands stand out as over a sea. Through the middle
of the plain flows a river, its stony bed cut deep into the earth;
silver trout leap in its pools, strips of grass border it--stretches of
pastureland in the midst of the desert--flocks of goats feed along its
banks, and from some convenient hollow rises the smoke of a nomad camp.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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