any years more. The doctor said that he must leave India for a time
to be in a healthier place. Should he go home to England, where all
his friends were? He wanted that; but much more he wanted to go on
with his work. So he asked the doctor if he might go to Persia on the
way home, and he agreed.

So Martyn went down from Cawnpore to Calcutta, and in a boat down the
Hoogli river to the little Arab coasting sailing ship the _Hummoudi_,
which hoisted sail and started on its voyage round India to Bombay.
Martyn read while on board the Old Testament in the original Hebrew
and the New Testament in the original Greek, so that he might
understand them better and make a more perfect translation into
Persian. He read the Koran of Mohammed so that he could argue with
the Persians about it. And he worked hard at Arabic grammar, and read
books in Persian. Yet he was for ever cracking jokes with his fellow
travellers, cooped up in the little ship on the hot tropical seas.

From Bombay the governor granted Martyn a passage up the Persian Gulf
in the _Benares_, a ship in the Indian Navy that was going on a cruise
to finish the exciting work of hunting down the fierce Arab pirates
of the Persian Gulf. So on Lady Day, 1811, the sailors got her under
weigh and tacked northward up the Gulf, till at last, on May 21, the
roofs and minarets of Bushire hove in sight. Martyn, leaning over the
bulwarks, could see the town jutting out into the Gulf on a spit of
sand and the sea almost surrounding it. That day he set foot for the
first time on the soil of Persia.

_Across Persia on a Pony_

Aboard ship Martyn had allowed his beard and moustache to grow. When
he landed at Bushire he bought and wore the clothes of a Persian
gentleman, so that he should escape from attracting everybody's notice
by wearing clothes such as the people had never seen before.

No one who had seen the pale, clean-shaven clergyman in black silk
coat and trousers in Cawnpore would have recognised the Henry
Martyn who rode out that night on his pony with an Armenian servant,
Zechariah of Isfahan, on his long one hundred and seventy mile journey
from Bushire to Shiraz. He wore a conical cap of black Astrakhan fur,
great baggy trousers of blue, bright red leather boots, a light tunic
of chintz, and over that a flowing cloak.

They went out through the gates of Bushire on to the great plain of
burning sand that stretched away for ninety miles ahead of them. They
travelle