'Through Persia on a side-saddle' [‎70] (101/360)

7o THROUGH PERSIA ON A SIDE-SADDLE
to give every servant either a suit of clothes or a month's
wages. My brother had fitted up our following at Tehran
with dark blue cloth liveries, and these they now donned
for the first time in order to make an impression on the
Kermanis.
We had halted some eight miles from the city, and my
brother and most of the servants went off about half-past
seven the next morning, leaving me with two or three men
to come on later.
About three in the afternoon the syce turned up leading
my horse, his face one broad grin of joy. He did not say
a word, good or bad, to anyone until he had mounted me
and we were off. Then his tongue was loosened, and he
burst into a flood of information about our new house,
and then gave himself free rein on the subject of the
istakbal. He told me that the Sahib had met the
procession a couple of miles from Kerman, where the
leading men of the town were assembled, and where they
made his acquaintance over tea and sherbets. He was
then invited to mount a minute steed with a Persian
saddle, gorgeous in velvet and gold trappings, but declined
to part from his faithful ' Cotmore.'
My little groom then waxed eloquent about the soldiers
in uniform; the ferashes bearing silver maces; the led
horses; the civic worthies; and the army who saluted the
procession at the city gates with kettledrums, repeating
the performance at intervals until the Consul had reached
his own residence. He told me with many a chuckle how
the Governor, the old Sahib Diwan, saw all unobserved,
as he imagined, from his citadel near the town gate, but
was, as a matter of fact, seen by everybody in turn.
As we neared Kerman, which appeared like a mud-