MODERN PERSIA AND ITS CAPITAL 



357 



Asiatic Belgium, Persia is strangely cut 

 off from world intercourse by those same 

 natural barriers which so affect her cli- 

 mate. 



PERSIA'S FIRST HIGHWAY BUILT IN IO,00 



At the opening of this century not a 

 single highway suitable for wheeled con- 

 veyances pierced the mountains to the 

 plateau. Handfuls of foreign officials 

 and infrequent venturesome travelers 

 made their toilsome way by caravan over 

 tortuous passes to the Persian capital or 

 to other Persian cities, and the Persians 

 themselves for the most part stayed at 

 home. But about 1900 a government- 

 subsidized Russian company opened a 

 post-road, as a military-commercial ven- 

 ture, which climbed from the Persian 

 port of Enzali, on the Caspian Sea, to the 

 capital city, Teheran. 



Five years ago three or four post-car- 

 riage routes and a narrow-gauge railway 

 running five and a half miles from Te- 

 heran to a suburban shrine were the only 

 competitors of the picturesque but slow- 

 moving caravan. 



Then came the pressure of the World 

 War. Russia rapidly substituted a mili- 

 tary railroad for the old carriage route 

 from her Transcaucasian boundary to 

 Tabriz, the provincial capital of Persian 

 Azerbaijan; but again the mountains in- 

 tervening between this projecting north- 

 western corner of Persia, with its Tatar 

 population, and the Persian-speaking 

 portion of the country, have prevented 

 this from being of more than local ad- 

 vantage. 



HOW THE WORLD WAR REDISCOVERED 

 PERSIA 



It was a more famous road, however, 

 over which Persia's neutrality became a 

 mere expression. Almost from the dawn 

 of history a great international highway 

 has held its threadlike course through the 

 plains of Mesopotamia from Babylon, 

 Ctesiphon, and Bagdad to the western 

 scarp of the Zagros Mountains, spiraled 

 up this mountain stairway, and continued 

 its way down trenchlike mountain val- 

 leys, over wind-swept passes, under the 

 great Behistun rock, which still bears 

 the triumphant inscriptions recorded by 

 Darius and his successors, and through 



Photograph by Roland Gorbold 



A LUR TRIBESMAN FROM THE MOUNTAINS 

 OF WESTERN PERSIA 



These nomadic inhabitants of Luristan are 



the lineal descendants of the old Iranian stock 

 of the time of Darius and Xerxes. This young- 

 man's tribe is indicated by his figured sash, 

 which has been carefully adjusted from a 

 twenty-yard length of cloth. 



