'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎12] (43/714)

12 PERSIA
of travel in the East, they may win a hearing even from the
desultorv reader. Nor shall I despair of arousing his concern
" when I turn from a past, however eventful, to a present,
SsSof however degenerate and sad. A country that possesses
the East railways is ipso facto the possessor of a great charm.
Here may still in many parts be found a people retaining the in
digenous customs and modesof Asiatic life, and as yet unawakened
to the summons that is beating at their doors. Fifty years hence
the outlying towns of Persia may have taken on some of the varnish
of the capital, and have lost their peculiar individuality of com
bined dignity and decay. But for the present Persia is of the
East, most Eastern; and though the Persian nobleman may ride
in a Russian brougham, the Persian merchant earn a I lench
watch, and the Persian peasant wear a Manchester blouse, yet the
heart of the nation is unregenerate, and is fanatically (and not
always unfortunately) attached to the ancient order of things.
We may still re-echo the words of the philosophic Chardin
That it is not in Asia as in our Europe, where there are frequent
changes more or less in the forms of things, as the habits, buildings,
gardenings and the like. In the East they are constant in all things.
The habits are at this clay in the same manner as in the precedent
ages ; so that one may reasonably believe that in that part of the world
the exterior forms of things (as their manners and customs) are the
same now as they were 2,000 years since, except in such changes as
may have been introduced by religion, which are nevertheless very
inconsiderable.
And here let me endeavour in some sort to explain to others
what I am sometimes conscious of having only imperfectly ex
its abiding plained to myself, viz. the wonderful and incalculable
charm fascination of the East. Mr. Stanley in one of his letters
spoke of the mysterious Soudan fever which drew Gordon and
many another brave spirit to perish in the dim recesses of Africa,
and which will require how many more human hecatombs before
its appetite be appeased ? Just such another, though a less perilous
contagion is that which tempts the traveller into Asia^ makes him
regardless of the petty restraints of distance and time, animated
only by a burning desire to go on. Perhaps it is that in the wide
landscape, in the plains stretching without break to mountains,
and the mountains succeeded by plains, in the routes that are
without roads, in the roads that are without banks or ditches, in