'GAZETTEER OF PERSIA. VOL. III. PART II: L to Z' [‎319r] (642/988)

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SHI—SHI
938
General Climatic Conditions.
Rain may be excepted between 21st November and 15th April ;
occasional showers from the latter date to 31st May. Rain rarely falls
more than three days in succession.
Snow may be expected at any time between 15th December and
1st April, rarely later than than date. On the Shlraj plain it seldom lies for
more than a day, but on the passes between Shiraj and Kazarun (Kutal-i-
Dukhtar, Kutal-i-Pir Zan, etc.), it may lie from three to eight days or
even longer. A like remark applies to the higher portion of the road
from Shiraz to Yazd-i-Khast (Isfahan).
Cold .—During the cold season, which may be taken to extend from 1st
January to the middle or even end of March, the nights are often intensely
cold. Thus on 28th January 1905 at 7-30 a.m., the thermometer stood at
17° Fahr. and on January 10th 1907, at 5-30 a.m., at 18° Fahr. Such
excessive cold, however, would appear to be rare from the fact that orange
and lemon trees grow unprotected in and round Shiraz.
Heat begins about the end of June or beginning of July lasting till about
the 26th of August, when (to judge from the experience of three summers)
there would appear to be always a marked fall in the temperature. Hot
days occur after this date, but a succession of hot days is rare. (This fact
is known to, and noted by, the Persians, who ascribe this change to the rising
of “ Satareh-i-Khunuk ”—cool star.) Even during the hottest weather
the nights are generally cool. Occasionally when the warm wind blows from
the south or south-west the nights are unpleasantly warm. It is both
possible and beneficial to sleep in the open air from May to October or even
later. No shelter is required. Up to the end of September there is prac
tically no dew and only occasionally after that date.
There is sometimes a recrudescence of heat in October.
W'ind .—The prevailing wind would appear to be from south-west—often
in summer hot and enervating. No facilities for gauging winds.
Marching seasons .—The best are from 1st April to middle or end of May,
and from 21st September to 15th November or even later in the year.
There is an utter absence of sanitation or any organised system of drain
age, each house having its own badly constructed cesspool, cleared out at the
will of the individual, thus rendering the whole sub-soil saturated with refuse
matter. The water itself is good, but, owing to a bad system of transporta
tion into the town by means of qantits, which are in some sections open,
it is easily infected and during an epidemic practically out of control within
the city walls. Considering the unsanitary condition of the town with its
badly planned and crowded houses, dirty, narrow streets, uncontrolled water-
supply and absence of any system of drainage, Shiraz is singularly free
from epidemics of specific diseases ; and the reason why the more or less
periodic (usually annual) epidemics of diphtheria, small-pox, enteric, chicken-
pox and measles do not cause a larger mortality is inconceivable. These
epidemics usually occur either in spring or autumn, with dysentery some
what severe during height of summer. Epidemics of cholera occur
at intervals of a decade or more ; the disease being imported either from
the Gulf or from the western frontier. The last epidemic of 1904 was,
in comparison with that of former years, very severe, the mortality being