JOURNEY TO EASTERN COURDISTAN. 
527 
timation of the total revenue of the country. Sir John Chardin 
mentions, that in his time the royal income only amounted to 
700,000 tomauns per annum, and that the population of the 
country exceeded forty millions of souls. The vast disproportion 
between these estimates, appears incredible; and the whole, 
indeed, is so completely different from what exists now, I cannot 
but suspect some mistake in our respected traveller. From the 
nearest computation I could arrive at, the present Shah’s public 
revenue is rather more than three millions and a half, and 
arising from a population of scarcely twelve millions of souls. 
When his royal highness Abbas Mirza set out for the camp 
of Sultania, I employed the time of his absence from Tabreez 
in prosecuting my intended tour through eastern Courdistan ; 
for, hot as the weather was, I yet wished to see part of a country 
in its summer beauty, I had so lately witnessed in all the se¬ 
verities of winter. 
Accordingly, attended by my usual suite, I set forth on 
the 22d of August, 1819, again towards the south ; and jour¬ 
neying between the towering summits of the Sehand on our 
left, and the hills and vales of the eastern bank of the Ouroomi 
on our right, kept the road by which we had arrived at Tabreez 
last December; our first halt being at Deygurgan. Thence we 
mounted the heights as before, amongst whose rocky buttresses 
I had observed the celebrated yellow marble of these regions, 
and which I now stopped to examine more closely. I men¬ 
tioned, on first remarking the spot, its being a kind of petrifac¬ 
tion formed by water flowing from the rocks above, and de¬ 
positing itself, by a gradual sinking through the surface of the 
earth, to a certain depth beneath. A sort of encrustation covers 
the whole far-spread mass, which extends down the slope of the 
I 
