an or British
influence in Isfahan will settle the balance in favour of one or the
other of the two countries and the eventual preponderance in the whole of
Western Iran.

Khorassan and Sistan stand on quite a different footing, being severed
from the West by the great Salt Desert, and must be set apart for the
moment and dealt with specially.

[Illustration: The Quivering Minarets near Isfahan.]

A reliable map ought to be consulted in order to understand the question
properly, but it should be remembered that it is ever dangerous to base
arguments on maps alone in discussing either political or commercial
matters. Worse still is the case when astoundingly incorrect maps such as
are generally manufactured in England are in the hands of people
unfamiliar with the real topography and resources of a country.

To those who have travelled it is quite extraordinary what an appalling
mass of nonsensical rubbish can be supplied to the public by politicians,
by newspaper penny-a-liners, and by home royal geographo-parasites at
large, who base their arguments on such unsteady foundation. It is quite
sufficient for some people to open an atlas and place their fingers on a
surface of cobalt blue paint in order to select strategical harbours,
point out roads upon which foreign armies can invade India, trade routes
which ought to be adopted in preference to others, and so on, regardless
of sea-depth, currents, winds, shelter, and climatic conditions. In the
case of roads for invading armies, such small trifles as hundreds of
miles of desert, impassable mountain ranges, lack of water, and no fuel,
are never considered! These are only small trifles that do not
signify--as they are not marked on the maps--the special fancy of the
cartographer for larger or smaller type in the nomenclature making cities
and villages more or less important to the student, or the excess of ink
upon one river course rather than another, according to the
cartographer's humour, making that river quite navigable, notwithstanding
that in reality there may not be a river nor a city nor village at all.
We have flaming examples of this in our Government maps of Persia.

I myself have had an amusing controversy in some of the London leading
papers with no less a person than the Secretary of a prominent
Geographical Society, who assured the public that certain well-known
peaks did not exist because he could not find them (they happened to be
there all the same