The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan | Page 5

the portraits of Sir Harford Jones and Sir John Malcolm,
as well as of General Gardanne, grouped by a pardonable anachronism
in the same picture. There is the king with 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