The Bujnurd Sheep 177 



Persians like to refer to as the " Askhabad chausee" 

 but there is so little of the highroad about it 

 that drivers of wheeled vehicles seem generally to 

 prefer the fields and ditches on either side. Our 

 cabby, who had undertaken to transport us the 

 hundred and eighty odd miles in four days, was 

 a Tartar, both literally and figuratively, and he 

 will live long in my memory. Long - cloaked, 

 loud-voiced, unshaved, dirty, insouciant, a cigar- 

 ette ever in the moist corner of his mouth, he 

 drove his team of four horses abreast with a skill 

 and nerve that would have done no discredit to a 

 horse-artillery driver. 



The ordinary sights of a Persian road have 

 been often described : the filthy and verminous 

 caravan-sarais, the tea-shops, the religious plays 

 enacted outside to a frenzied and sobbing audience, 

 the blinding and all-pervading dust, the siestas 

 in the scented shade of a rose-garden, the impor- 

 tunate and impertinent beggars. One truculent 

 individual of the latter genus came up brandish- 

 ing his axe, and not getting what he wanted, 

 called me mouzi and other opprobrious epithets, 

 till he was reduced to silence by the point of 

 an umbrella deftly delivered in the gastric region 

 by my travelling companion, the well-known 

 Indian attach 6 of the Meshed Consulate -General. 



Some places of historic interest are passed on 



M 



