'A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the years 1808 and 1809, in which is included some account of the proceedings of his Majesty's Mission, under Sir Harford Jones, Bart., to the Court of the King of Persia. With twenty-five engravings from the designs of the author; a plate of inscriptions; and three maps.' [‎41] (76/524)

RESIDENCE OF THE MISSION AT BUSHIRE. 41
kind were celebrating the feast. Among their sports, I discovered some
thing like the round-about of an English fair, except that it appeared
of a much ruder construction. It consisted of two rope-seats suspended,
in the form of a pair of scales, from a large stake fixed in the ground.
In these were crowded full-grown men who, like boys, enjoyed the conti
nual twirl, in which the conductor of the sport, a poor Arab, was labour
ing with all his strength to keep the machine.
The feast itself of the Bairam begins of course successively in every
season of the natural year, for in the formation of their civil year the
Persians, like other Mahomedans, adopt lunar months. When it occurs
in summer, the Ramazan, or month of fasting which precedes it, be
comes extremely severe; every man of every kind of business, the la
bourer in the midst of the hardest work, is forbidden to take any kind
of nourishment from sun-rise to sun-set, during the longest days of the
.year. Their full day is calculated from sun-set to sun-set, but their sub
division of time varies like that of the Hindoos and Mussulmans of
India, according to the difference of the length of the natural day. In
their calculation of the close of the fast, and the commencement of the
Bairam, they are seldom assisted by almanacks: it frequently happens,
therefore, that the same feast is celebrated two days earlier, or de
layed two days later in different parts of the country, according to
the state of the atmosphere: as the new moon may be obscured by
clouds in one city or displayed in another by the clearness of the sky.
On the 21st of November Mahomed Hassan Khan Karaou^lou
paid the appointed visit to the Envoy. A part of the body guard was
sent out to meet him, and we received him as before in uniforms and
hats. After the usual ceremonies were over, the Envoy and his guest
retired to an inner apartment; and after a conference, which lasted four
hours, the Khan departed to Bushire with the same escort, to whom on
parting he gave a present of fifty Venetian sequins. The conference
had been satisfactory, as at dinner the Envoy announced to us that y^e
might now complete all our preparations for a journey to Teheran. Still
with a volatility not unusual in the diplomacy of the East, the Khan
G