e and Allah--The water question--The coachman's
backshish--The White River--Olive groves--Halting places on the
road--The effects of hallucination--Princes abundant.

We have seen how the road was made. Now let us travel on it in the hired
landau and four horses driven by a wild-looking coachman, whose locks of
jet-black hair protrude on either side of his clean-shaven neck, and
match in colour his black astrakan, spherical, brimless headgear. Like
all good Persians, he has a much pleated frockcoat that once was black
and is now of various shades of green. Over it at the waist he displays a
most elaborate silver belt, and yet another belt of leather with a
profusion of cartridges stuck in it and a revolver.

Why he did not run over half-a-dozen people or more as we galloped
through the narrow streets of Resht town is incomprehensible to me, for
the outside horses almost shaved the walls on both sides, and the
splash-boards of the old landau ditto.

That he did not speaks volumes for the flexibility and suppleness of
Persian men, women and children, of whom, stuck tight against the walls
in order to escape being trampled upon or crushed to death, one got mere
glimpses, at the speed one went.

The corners of the streets, too, bore ample testimony to the inaccuracy
of drivers in gauging distances, and so did the hubs and splash-boards of
the post-carriages, all twisted and staved in by repeated collisions.

It is with great gusto on the part of the drivers, but with a certain
amount of alarm on the part of the passenger, that one's carriage chips
off corner after corner of the road as one turns them, and one gets to
thank Providence for making houses in Persia of easily-powdered mud
instead of solid stone or bricks.

One's heart gets lighter when we emerge into the more sparsely inhabited
districts where fields and heavy vegetation line the road, now very wide
and more or less straight. Here the speed is greatly increased, the
coachman making ample use of a long stock whip. In Persia one always
travels full gallop.

After not very long we pull up to disburse the road toll at a wayside
collecting house. There are a great many caravans waiting, camels, mules,
donkeys, horsemen, _fourgons_, whose owners are busy counting hard silver
krans in little piles of 10 krans each--a _toman_, equivalent to a
dollar,--without which payment they cannot proceed. Post carriages have
precedence over everybody, and we are