At the bottom of the hill we rested for a few minutes, and drank tea at the caravanserai of the Imam Zadeh Hashem. Here our friendly bridle-path came to an end, and a muddy road lay before us, leading to Resht and the Caspian. We set off with renewed spirits, and traversed the four or five miles between us and our last post-house at a gentle canter. On either side of the road rose a wall of densest vegetation, with here and there a marshy pond covered with rushes, and here and there a tiny clearing, from which the encroaching jungle was with difficulty held back. A luxuriant plant-life covered every stem and every log of wood with moss and ferns, the very huts were half hidden under gourds, which climbed up the walls and laid their fruit and broad leaves across the thatching of the roofs. Charming indeed are the wooden cottages of Ghilan, standing with their backs set into the forest, which has been forced to yield them a foot or two of ground, with verandas supported by columns of rudely-dressed tree-trunks, and with the glow of the firelight (as when we passed that evening) shining through doors and chinks and crevices, while the pleasant smell of wood-smoke rises round them; but the damp climate has set its seal of disease upon the people--they are white and hollow-cheeked, the dark eyes look enormous in the thin faces and glow with the light of fever. They die young, these people, whose meagre bodies are consumed by malaria and shaken by agues. The post-house of Kudum stands in a small clearing, with ponds round it, the abode of frogs. We found it tolerably comfortable; the swallows which had been nesting in the rafters when we had passed in the spring, and which had disturbed us in the very early hours of the morning with twitterings and flutterings, had fled now, taking their fledged little ones with them; but one of the rooms which was offered to us seemed to belong to someone more important than swallows. His bed was all prepared in it, and on a table were strewn his writing materials, reed pens and inkpots and sheets of paper. We inquired whose was the room of which we had thus summarily entered into possession. ‘Oh,’ said the people of the post-house indifferently, ‘it is only the room of the Naïb.’ Now, Naïb means deputy, it is also the title of the Shah’s third son, the Commander-in-Chief--who this particular Naïb was we failed to ascertain, but we had visions of a trampling ragged army surrounding our beds late at night, while the Naïb-es-Sultan, with the portrait of the Shah blazing in diamonds upon his breast, commanded us in indignant tones to quit the rooms which had been prepared for him, or of waking to find some humbler deputy seated at the table and writing busily with his reed pens complaints of our insolence to his Government. We were undisturbed, however, except by frogs, who croaked unsoothing lullabies in our ears, and by the bells of a caravan of camels which passed at