From Tabriz they set out in the heart of winter, the country being covered with deep snow, and the roads, in consequence, almost impassable. The bright reflection of the sunbeams from the snow produced an extraordinary effect upon the Russians. Their faces swelled, and many of them were afflicted with ophthalmia. But the Persians themselves are liable to the latter inconvenience, and, in order to guard against it, wear a network fillet of black horsehair over the eyes; which Bell found, upon trial, to be an effectual preventive. This contrivance, I imagine, might be made use of with equal success in traversing the sands of Egypt or Arabia. As they proceeded southward they quickly escaped from the regions of snow, and on reaching Sarva, a small town a little to the north of Koom, found the pomegranate-trees already in blossom on the 22d of February. The Persians, at least that part of them who make any claim to civilization, are a pleasant people to travel among. For if, in classic lands, Not a mountain reared its head unsung, no mountain, no, nor valley neither, rears or lowers its head without having some particular legend attached to it. Near Koom you are shown a hill from which no one who has been mad enough to reach the top ever descended; and are told a lamentable story of a young page sent up with a lighted torch in his hand by Shah Abbas, who, of course, never returned, but may yet perhaps come down with his torch unconsumed, upon the re-advent of the Twelfth Imam. At Kashan your imagination is excited by being placed in apartments, the floors of which are almost paved with scorpions, the sting of every one of which is more deadly than the sword of Rûstam, or the lance of Afrasiab. But these reptiles, like the spear of Achilles, undo, as it were, with one hand what they perform with the other; for when they have darted their poison into the frame, they yield, on being caught and fried, though not alive, I hope, an oil which the Persians reckon an infallible antidote to their venom. The only advantage which seems to be derived from this energetic little reptile is, that it enriches the Persian language with a new variety of that rhetorical figure of speech called commination, or cursing; for when any person is desirous of concentrating his wrath in a single imprecation, instead of having recourse to that convenient but vulgar demon who takes our enemies off our hands in Europe, he arms his wishes with the sting of a Kashan scorpion, and flings that at the head of his adversaries.