via_ Tehran than _via_ Suez. There was an interesting race last year
between the companies to communicate to India the result of the Derby,
and it was won in a way by the cable line. The messages were
simultaneously despatched from Epsom, that by Tehran reaching Bombay
five seconds before the other, but as the name of the winning horse only
was given correctly, Karachi, six hundred miles distant, had to be
asked for a repetition of the names of the second and third horses. The
cable telegram gave the three names accurately. Had Karachi been agreed
upon as the point of arrival for India, instead of Bombay, the
Indo-European would have won this telegraph race.

CHAPTER III.

--Kasvin grapes
--Persian wine
--Vineyards in Persia
--Wine manufacture
--Mount Demavend
--Afshar volcanic region
--Quicksilver and gold
--Tehran water-supply
--Village quarrels
--Vendetta
--Tehran tramways
--Bread riots
--Mint and copper coin.

The grape harvest was being gathered at Kasvin as we passed through. The
place is well known for its extensive vineyards and fine fruit-gardens.
Its golden grapes have a wide reputation, and these, with the white
species, also grown there, are in steady demand for wine manufacture,
which is carried on in the town, notwithstanding the greatly
disproportionate number of Moullas among the inhabitants. Large
quantities of the grapes are also sent to Tehran for wine purposes
there. Persia keeps up the character for strong wine which it had 600
B.C., when the Scythian invaders took to it so eagerly as to establish
the saying, 'As drunk as a Scythian.' It was said that these
hard-headed, deep-drinking, wild warriors were always thirsting for
'another skinful,' and were ever ready to declare that the last was
always the best. Eighteen hundred years later, Hafiz, the merry poet,
sang aloud the praises of Shiraz wine, which to this day bears a high
reputation in Persia, a reputation which was royally good in the
traditional bygone time long before Cyrus, when it appears to have been
highly appreciated in the festivities of Glorious Jamshed, the founder
of Persepolis. The poet Omar Khayyam, in moralizing over the ruins of
the fallen splendour of that famous place, speaks in Fitzgerald's
'Rubaiyat':

'They say the lion and the lizard keep
The Court where Jamshed gloried and drank deep.'

The Persian poet-historian Firdausi ascribes to Jamshed the discovery of
wine in his leisure from kingly dut