156 BAKU. 



town, — and, above all for you, an excellent hotel, with 

 first-class restaurant and most of the appliances which 

 modern civilisation has devised to make life livable, 

 extends a cordial welcome to the traveller. 



That is one aspect of Baku, but there is another 

 far more important, because it represents the sole 

 excuse for the city's existence. As all the world 

 knows, Baku and its 150,000 inhabitants exist upon 

 oil. If there were no oil there would be no Baku. 

 So, in addition to the Baku of lofty houses, well-stocked 

 shops, and spacious streets, there is a ville noire, where 

 thousands of tons of crude oil are daily reduced to 

 kerosene, benzine, lubricating oil, and residues for fuel ; 

 and there are also at a little distance from the town 

 vast forests of derricks, queer grimy -looking pyramidal 

 erections, under cover of which are carried on those 

 mysterious operations of boring and pumping which 

 disgorge the wealth-bringing oil from the bowels of 

 the earth. I think Balakhani, with its 2000 derricks 

 packed as closely to one another as the trees of a forest, 

 presents one of the weirdest sights it has ever been 

 my fortune to behold. 



A curious feature connected with the oil-fields is the 

 escape of inflammable gas which is observable in various 

 places. It is possible literally to set the Caspian on fire 

 on a calm night in certain spots near the peninsula, 

 and there are places where it is only necessary to make 

 a hole in the ground with your stick to let loose a jet 

 of gas giving a flame of several feet in height.-^ This 

 phenomenon was observed and recorded of old by one 

 Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, who wrote that "in 

 Taurida, in any piece of ground where springs of naphtha 



^ In ' Telegraph and Travel ' Sir F. Goldsmid writes : " To say that these 

 fires are curious or worth seeing is to say nothing. They are marvellous, 

 and worthy of classification among natural wonders." 



