354 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



Photograph by Roland Gorbold 



A PERSIAN GENDARME 



The police service of Teheran was entrusted 

 to Swedish organizers in 1913- The gendar- 

 merie numbers 8,400 men. Before the World 

 War, Russian officers trained the Persian army. 



plateau, a lone remainder of her inherit- 

 ance (see map, page 418). 



Sultan Ahmed Shah, the one hundred 

 fifty-sixth "king of kings," sits on the 

 tottering Persian throne, while the future 

 of his kingdom rests in the hands of out- 

 side powers. 



A VAST, MOUNTAIN-RIBBED DESERT 

 PLATEAU 



Modern Persia, with the exception of 

 the prosperous northwest province of 

 Turkish - speaking Azerbaijan and the 

 semi-tropical region between the Elburz 

 Mountains and the Caspian Sea, can be 

 characterized as a vast, mountain-ribbed 

 desert plateau, studded here and there 

 with oases which most frequently form 

 ribbons of fertile green fringing the des- 

 ert at the bases of sterile mountain slopes 

 from whose snow-clad summits comes 

 the life-giving moisture. 



The encircling mountain walls shut out 

 the rain from the central table - land. 

 Rivers with sources but no mouths flow 

 half the year and lose themselves in the 

 parched desert wastes. 



The density of population is less than 

 that of Texas, and more than half the 

 country is an uninhabited Sahara, some 

 of it unexplored. Much of the remainder 

 is suitable only for sheep-grazing part of 

 the year, thus forcing upon a fourth of 

 her ten million people a semi-nomadic ex- 

 istence between the high, well-watered 

 mountain valleys in the summer and the 

 warm plains in the brief winter season. 



Some of these tribes, like the Kurds, 

 rarely leave their mountain homes, where 

 they exist independently of central gov- 

 ernment control. Others, like the Ghash- 

 gais and Bakhtiaris, sometimes by coer- 

 cion and sometimes through necessity of 

 political alliance, are vassals of the state, 

 although they pay allegiance only to their 

 chiefs, who arrange with regal authority 

 for their followers the matters of taxes 

 and military service. 



Cities are naturally few and small, 

 there being but two or three of more than 

 100,000 inhabitants. The lower moun- 

 tain valleys and the oases are the centers 

 for both town and agricultural popula- 

 tion, and the wonderful fertility of these 

 scattered areas, snatched from the blight- 

 ing grasp of the desert, forms the basis 



