234 THE PERSIAN. 



Keppel mentions one of these riding expresses, who 

 passed him between Kermanshaw and Hamadan, 

 one hundred and twenty miles distant from each 

 other, in a stony mountainous country, who per- 

 formed that route on one horse (and of course a 

 common horse) in little more than twenty-four 

 hours, and next morning went on upon the same 

 for Teheran, two hundred miles further, expecting 

 to reach it on the second day. Indeed chuppers, 

 unlike Turkish Tahtars, seldom change horses ; they 

 go on at a steady ambling pace of four or five miles 

 an hour, and some have gone from Teheran to 

 Bushire, seven hundred miles, in ten days. 



These instances are sufficient to prove the en- 

 during power of the Persian horses, even of inferior 

 studs, and the adventurous riding of the native 

 sportsmen, as acknowledged by British gentle- 

 men well acquainted with fox-hunting, evidently 

 proves their sure-footedness, in the daring way 

 the riders gallop down the steepest and most rug- 

 ged hills. They are usually fed and watered an 

 hour after sunrise, and again at sunset, when they 

 are rubbed down and brushed ; their barley or rice, 

 and chopped straw or chaff, is put in a nose-bag 

 hung from their heads, if they are at the picquet ; 

 but in the stable it is placed into a lozenge-shaped 

 hole made in the mud- wall for that purpose, but 

 higher than European mangers, and thence the ani- 

 mal draws it at his leisure. Hay is unknown in the 

 East : horse-litter, in Persia, consists of the dung 

 reduced to powder and daily dried in the sun. 



