hat the Turcoman freebooters did on
more than one occasion push their _alamans_ or raids as far even as
Ispahan. The tribe by whom Hajji Baba is taken captive in the opening
chapters is seemingly rather the Yomuts beyond Atrek River than the
Tekke Turcomans of Akhal Tekke. I have myself ridden over the road
between Abbasabad and Shahrud, where they were in the habit of swooping
down upon the defenceless and terror-stricken caravans; and the
description of the panic which they created among vastly superior
numbers of Persians is in nowise exaggerated. The pillar of skulls which
Aga Mohammed Shah is represented as having erected in chapter vii. was
actually raised by that truculent eunuch at Bam in Persian Beluchistan,
and was there noticed by an English traveller, Sir Henry Pottinger, in
1810. I have seen the story of the unhappy Zeenab and her fate described
a review of "Hajji Baba" as more characteristic of the seraglio at
Stamboul than of the harem at Tehran. This is an ignorant remark; for
this form of execution was more than once inflicted during the reign of
Fath Ali Shah. At Shiraz there still exists a deep well in the mountain
above city, down which, until recently, women convicted of adultery were
hurled; and when I was at Bokhara in 1888 there had, in the preceding
year, been more than one case of execution by being thrown from the
summit of the Minari-Kalan or Great Minaret. It is an interesting
but now well-nigh forgotten fact that the Christian dervish who is
represented in chapter lix. as publicly disputing with the _mollahs_ in
a _medresseh_ at Ispahan, and as writing a refutation of the Mohammedan
creed, was no other than the famous Henry Martyn, who created a
prodigious sensation by the fearlessness of his polemics while at
Shiraz, and who subsequently died at Tokat, in Asiatic Turkey, in 1812.
The incidental mention of the great diamond or 'Mountain of Light' that
was worn by Fath Ali Shah in one of his _bazubands_ or armlets, though
historically inaccurate, is also of interest to English readers;
since the jewel alluded to is the Daria-i-Nur or Sea of Light, the
sister-stone to the Koh-i-Nur or Mountain of Light, which, in the
previous century, had been carried from Persia to Afghanistan, and in
this century passed through the hands of Runjit Singh, the Lion of the
Punjab, into the regalia of the British crown. The 'Sea of Light' is
still at Tehran.

In two respects the Persia of "Hajji Baba" differs n