'Notes of a journey from Kasreen to Hamadan across the Karaghan country. By J. D. Rees' [‎5v] (15/54)

2
NOTES OE A JOUENEY
summer retreat of the Kings of Media and Persia. Hamadan
itself has been fully described. Kasveen is known to every
traveller from Teheran to Kesht en route for Europe, but the
intervening country is unknown to Europeans, so far as I could
learn after the fullest inquiry at Teheran and elsewhere. An
Austrian botanist (Dr. Pulak) had once gone vid Ab-i-garm and
Kabouterkhana to Hamadan, but this left a large tract of hill and
plain, due south of Kasveen and due east of the places mentioned,
untouched.
Most travellers in Persia have inferred I think, or have
given their readers the impression that they have inferred, that
the country they have passed through is a fair sample of the
country as a whole, and the travellers who have been off the
postal route from Bushire to Teheran and Kesht are few. Now,
that route skirts the east of the great desert and is, in fact, at
least as sterile, except where it passes through the plains of
Shiraz, Kazeroon, and Ispahan, as any part of Persia, the desert
proper alone excluded. True it is known that the Bakhtiari
country and parts of Luristan present a very different appearance.
Major Bell and Mr. Stack are the latest witnesses on this point.
Again the beaten track from Teheran to Hamadan, and thence to
the Turkish frontier, has been fully described.
Is it known, however, that away up to the Elburz range
extend fertile and well-watered plains covered with corn, and
vineyards, and orchards, and hills, that, unirrigated, give a fair
annual return of wheat—hills which did not fail to do this even
in the disastrous famine of 1870 ? These notes will show that
such is the character of the tract I traversed, while my inquiries
go to show further that the other tract referred to, viz., that
between Kom and Hamadan, much resembles it. Nor is the
country south of this, about Sultanabad and Gulpaigan, less fer
tile, while further south again the country of the Karun and
the Tigris is reached, a part of what was, till war and rapine
destroyed it, the garden of the world.
It has happened that many writers have, from military and
other considerations, chiefly confined their observations to the
country bordering on Afghanistan and Beloochistan, while that
west of the main route from sea to sea has received the attention
for the most part of savants who were chiefly interested in its
archaeology.
At any rate it is the case, I venture to think, that the public
at large, and many of the informed minority, do not appreciate in
its full significance the fact that the whole country west of the
beaten track from sea to sea presents a marked contrast to that