390 
LIZARDS OF K A SHAN. 
wooing the roses from their spray, I can only say, that not one 
in ten of them had any thing of a voice ; and so little of an ear, 
that without an idea of a tune, they went bawling on, sometimes 
singly, sometimes in concert, in one loud uproar, occasionally 
broken now and then by a guttural shake, not unlike the 
guggling of water in a bottle. 
1 was told by their own countrymen, that the inhabitants of 
Kashan are over-reaching, to a proverb. A vice that seems 
indigenous to mere local trafficking ; it being difficult to make 
petty dealers understand the mutually enriching consequences of 
the broad principles of reciprocal confidence, on which great 
commercial establishments transact business. Kashan has 
another sort of reptile within its walls, a terrible breed of 
scorpions of the most venomous description. Fortunately for 
me, I lodged without the city; and to that, probably, we owed 
our escape from making a disagreeable acquaintance with both. 
Indeed, I have every reason to thank God, that neither myself, 
nor any of my people, had ever yet felt a single smart from the 
touch of any one of the numerous poisonous creatures with 
which these warm regions are infested. At this season of the 
year, this ephemeral sort of life seems to swarm, both in the air, 
and on the ground ; and amongst the harmless inhabitants of 
the latter, I observed numbers of lizards and tortoises crawling 
along the sides of the roads. Some of the former were of 
strange shapes, and others of an unusual length; one, that we 
found dead, was above two feet from the nose to the tip of the 
tail. I remarked, that these animals invariably took the colour 
of the ground in which each particular kind existed. If verdant, 
the lizard was green ; if sandy, she was a yellowish white; if 
red earth, or reddish mouldering stones, she was pink; and if 
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