The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 5

his spider’s waist and his lordly beard; and there are the princes and the ministers of whom we have been reading. The philanthropic efforts of the Englishmen to force upon the reluctant Persians the triple boon of vaccination, post-mortem examinations, and potatoes, are also authentic.
Quite a number of smaller instances may be cited in which what appears only as an incident or an illustration in the story is in reality a historical fact. It is the case that the Turcoman freebooters did on more than one occasion push their alamans or raids as far even as Ispahan. The tribe by whom Hajji Baba is taken captive in the opening chapters is seemingly rather the Yomuts beyond Atrek River than the Tekke Turcomans of Akhal Tekke. I have myself ridden over the road between Abbasabad and Shahrud, where they were in the habit of swooping down upon the defenceless and terror-stricken caravans; and the description of the panic which they created among vastly superior numbers of Persians is in nowise exaggerated. The pillar of skulls which Aga Mohammed Shah is represented as having erected in chapter vii. was actually raised by that truculent eunuch at Bam in Persian Beluchistan, and was there noticed by an English traveller, Sir Henry Pottinger, in 1810. I have seen the story of the unhappy Zeenab and her fate described a review of “Hajji Baba” as more characteristic of the seraglio at Stamboul than of the harem at Tehran. This is an ignorant remark; for this form of execution was more than once inflicted during the reign of Fath Ali Shah. At Shiraz there still exists a deep well in the mountain above city, down which, until recently, women convicted of adultery were hurled; and when I was at Bokhara in 1888 there had, in the preceding year, been more than one case of execution by being thrown from the summit of the Minari-Kalan or Great Minaret. It is an interesting but now well-nigh forgotten fact that the Christian dervish who is represented in chapter lix. as publicly disputing with the mollahs in a medresseh at Ispahan, and as writing a refutation of the Mohammedan creed, was no other than the famous Henry Martyn, who created a prodigious sensation by the fearlessness of his polemics while at Shiraz, and who subsequently died at Tokat, in Asiatic Turkey, in 1812. The incidental mention of the great diamond or ‘Mountain of Light’ that was worn by Fath Ali Shah in one of his bazubands or armlets, though historically inaccurate, is also of interest to English readers; since the jewel alluded to is the Daria-i-Nur or Sea of Light, the sister-stone to the Koh-i-Nur or Mountain of Light, which, in the previous century, had been carried from Persia to Afghanistan, and in this century passed through the hands of Runjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, into the regalia of the British crown. The ‘Sea of Light’ is still at Tehran.
In two respects the Persia of “Hajji Baba” differs notably from the Persia of to-day. The national, and still more the court dress, as depicted by him, have been considerably modified. The Kashmir shawls and turbans, and the red-cloth gaiters, which were de rigueur at the court of Fath Ali Shah, are now only seen at the salams or official levees of Nasr-ed-Din Shah. Nor does the young dandy of modern Tehran wear the lofty black sheepskin kolah or hat, indented at the top and stuck on sideways, as described by Morier. A lower and less pretentious variety of the same head-gear adorns the brow of the fin de siècle Iranian gallant. Secondly, the Tehran of “Hajji Baba” has been transmogrified almost out of existence; and, in particular, the fortified Ark or Palace of the earlier Kajars, with its watch-towers and the open porch over the gates in which the king sat to see reviews, and the lofty octagonal tower from which Zeenab was thrown, have been entirely obliterated in the more spacious architectural reconstruction of the reigning Shah.
Unchanged, however, are those customs by which now, as then, the royal coffers require to be replenished or the royal purse relieved by the application of a judicious spur to the backward generosity of the subjects of the King of Kings. Still, as described in “Hajji Baba,” is the visit of the Sovereign to any of his officials the recognised intimation that a large money equivalent is expected for the unsolicited honour. Still must the presents of the king be repaid by gifts of more than corresponding value to the bearers of the royal favour. Still is the sending of the royal khalat or dress of office adopted as an ingenious method of discharging the arrears of wages due to the royal ministers or servants. In chapter xxxiii. the sub-lieutenant to