'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎107] (142/714)

FROM ASHKABAD TO KUCHAN
107
you to travel ? How much do they pay you ? If not they, then
who pays you ? ' The taste for travel and gratuitous thirst for
knowledge are emotions quite incomprehensible to the Oriental
mind. 1
I had great difficulty also in explaining to him my own pro
fession and the position of my family. Parliament he had never
heard of; and when I told him that I was a member of the ereat
J o
mejilis (council), he replied, ' Are you a soldier ? ' The status or
rank of an English nobleman conveyed nothing to him ; but he put
the pertinent questions, ' Has your father many soldiers ?' and
' Who made him governor of his property ? ' He was positively
amazed at a tenure of the same estates lasting over 800 years, but
replied, in the spirit of Mr. Hardcastle in ' She Stoops to Conquer,' 2
and with a Conservatism which I could not fail to admire, that
Ferenghistan was a great country because of its antiquity ; age, as
he said, meaning authority.
Acting in unconscious imitation of Fraser, who, nearly seventy
years before, had presented a silver hunting watch to the father of
Gift to the my host, I endeavoured to make some little recognition
Khan of the hospitality of which I was the recipient by offering
the Ilkhani The paramount chief of certain tribes in south west Iran. a watch, the hours and minutes upon the face of which
were marked not by a revolving hand, but by numerals appearing
on a disc. He was vastly interested in this novelty; but as he
could not understand the figures, which did not correspond with
the Roman numerals on watches which he had previously seen or
possessed, I had to draw up a table with the ordinary numerals
from 1 to GO and their Roman equivalents, to which his secretary
appended a Persian translation. Having accepted the watch, the
Shuja somewhat staggered me by inquiring how much it had cost.
I attributed this question, which in a European would have implied
impertinent curiosity, to the Oriental desire to make a return of
as nearly as possible equivalent value to the donor, the notorious
character of the Ilkhani The paramount chief of certain tribes in south west Iran. for stinginess rendering it certain that he
1 ' These people cannot conceive that any one should travel for pleasure oi from
curiosity. Who, argue they, would voluntarily undergo the fatigues and dangers,
not to mention the heavy expense, of a long journey merely for the sake of collect
ing information? If, therefore, there be no ostensible motive for the journey, as
that of business or of traffic, they at once assign the one in their opinion most
likely,'—Fraser, Journey Into Khorasan, p. 579.
2 ' I love everything that's old : old friends, old times, old manners, old books,
old wine.'