'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎14] (45/714)

TERSIA
14
readers whose ideas of nature are drawn exclusively from the
West the extremity of the contrast that meets the eye. Mountains
' ' in Europe are for the most part blue or purple m
^Persia colour • in Persia they are flame-red, or umber, or funereal
drab Fields in Europe, when not decked with the green of grass
or crops are crimson with upturned mould. In Persia they are
only distinguishable from the brown desert by the dry beds of the
irrigation ditches. A typical English village consist of detached
and" often picturesque cottages, half hidden amid venerable trees.
A typical Persian village is a cluster of filthy mud huts, whose
outline is a crude combination of the perpendicular and the hori
zontal, huddled within the protection of a decayed mud wall.
Outside the Caspian provinces and a few mountain valleys there
is not a forest, and barely a wood in Persia that is worthy of
the name. One may travel for days without seeing a blade of
grass. Rivers do not roll between trim banks, nor do brooks
babble over stones. Either you are stopped by a foaming torrent,
or you barely moisten your horse's fetlocks in fording a pitiful
thread.
For my own part—so normal and blunted after a while do these
sensations become—I find a more abiding charm in the contrast
existing, not between the lives of the East and W est, but
contradic- in the elements and conditions of Oriental life itself. It
tl0n is a contrast equally visible in the inanimate and in the
human world. Extensive plains are suddenly terminated, almost
without slope or undulation, by gaunt and forbidding peaks. A
drear and colourless desolation in winter is succeeded b) riotous,
though ephemeral, verdure and a thousand tints of flowers in the
spring. Even in the green and cultivated spots, the moment we
leave the charmed circle of water distribution the stark desert
recommences, and the transition is as awful as from lile to
death. An entrancing warmth by day is expiated in the autumn
and winter months by biting cold at night and in the hours imme
diately preceding sunrise. Nature seems to revel in striking the
extreme chords upon her miraculous and inexhaustible gamut of
sound.
And how faithfully do the cities and people respond to the
The lies of suggestion that is always eloquent around them. Majestic
life ruins that tell of a populous and mighty past rear their
heads amid deserted wastes and vagabond tents. Tiny and ill-