PERSIA AS IT IS.• DR. J. WILLS was employed for
many years as Medical Officer to the English Telegraph Department in Persia, and he made good use of his opportunities. He learned the language, he made friends among all classes—there is a story about a barber which reveals the author as a man of irresistible bonhomie and kindliness—he talked gossip in the harems, where a doctor's visit was a rift in the cloud of ennui, and he studied the manners around with a sympathy not always quite in- telligible. Though obviously a good-natured man, nothing shocks him ; he regards everything, or affects to regard it, as a Persian would ; and he relates hideous cruelties with the calmness of one who thinks as well as says,— "This is the way of the world—in Persia." Naturally he was popular, his popularity being assisted by two facts, one of which is old, but the other may be as new to our readers as it is to ourselves. No one can read an English book about Persia without seeing that Persians, almost alone among Eastern races, attract Englishmen ; that something in them makes them intelligible to our countrymen, who for their sake even lay aside their customary obtuse indifference, and endeavour to under- stand. This is patent in every book of Persian travel, adventure, or sojourn ; but we were not so well aware that the feeling was reciprocal. Dr. Wills says it is so, however, asserting that even the English telegraph clerks become favourites in their stations, and rise to positions of marked influence and respect. Dr. Wills describes the process, and in so doing draws the pleasantest picture of "the Englishman abroad" we have seen for a long time :— " Gradually the Englishman 'takes root;' he doesn't want to be moved ; he hits it off' with the Persians. The solitary makes friends —real friends, not mere acquaintances. Strange to say, these friends are often from the priesthood, the most fanatical among the Moslems. And these Oriental friends always confess that what originally attracted them to their new ally is the strange fact that an English- man doesn't lie. In Persia, the great hotbed of lies and intrigue, a man who does not lie is indeed a phenomenon. Very soon the Englishman is invited to dinners, to marriage-feasts, even to picnics ; for he is a lion, and the Leohnnter exists even in Persia—always, however, of the male sex. Little by little the influence of the man who tells the truth' begins to spread : disputes are referred to him ; for is he not the only judge in the place who does not hunger for a bribe ? An unpaid arbitrator, he embodies the law' in many a knotty dispute. There are no fees in his court, and, the reference being by mutual consent and purely unofficial, there can be no appeal. Soon the English solitary finds himself a man of importance. He is a welcome guest at the house of the local governor, who may even return his calls. On his visiting-list are several khans, perhaps even a prince or two. Nor are these visits monotonous. Persians drop in, • Persia as It Is, By I. Wills, N.D. London ; Sampson Low and Clo. and smoke their own or their host's kalians (or water-pipes), and drink innumerable cups of weak sweet tea."
Thus qualified by residence, knowledge, and popularity, Dr.
Wills draws for us a most interesting picture of the Persians in their outer and inner life—as Governors and as prisoners, as hosts and as priests, in the bazaar and in the Court, in the magistrate's office and in the privacy of their own houses —and leaves on us the strange impression that we have already heard it all. He is not telling us things, but only confirming things told to us before. The cause of that impres- sion is, of course, that Dr. Wills being truthful and intelligent, can but justify to the letter the descriptions of Persia given in Morier's Hajji Baba, the one perfect sketch ever drawn by an Englishman of an Oriental people. Things in Persia, Dr. Wills says, do not change, "they only decay ;" and Persia and the Persians are to-day what they were in the time of Morier, sixty years ago. The population has grown thinner from misgovernment and the great famine, but Southern Persia remains what it was, an arid desert, waiting only irrigation to become fertile ; while Northern Persia is a land unsurpassed in climate, richness of produce, and general capacity for happiness. The air is always dry, yet always pleasant ; the land will yield everything—from wheat to pineapples—in the same place ; and so plentiful is food, both for man and beast, that Persia may be described as "the Paradise of the poor man :"—
" But there is yet a playground almost untrodden by the tourist's foot : a land where hotels are not—or where, at any rate, there is but one; a land where the Eastern caravanserai opens its hospitable doors to every man, rich or poor ; a land where one can travel en prince, or ' pad the hoof,' and live decently on ninepence a day ; a country to all intents and purposes the Far East, yet touching Europe ; a country interesting to the botanist and naturalist, for its verdant soil teems with animal life, its streams are fall of fish innocent of the arts of the angler; a country of magnificent forests, abounding with game, large and small—pheasants, partridges, wild duck, snipe, bears, wild sheep, antelope, panthers, tigers—aye, and lions • a country where a serviceable horse is to be had for a 210 note, and where feed never
exceeds sixpence a day. As for climate, perfection In Persia the traveller may go royally with a string of males, tents, horses, and even carriages if he will, with his cooks and kitchen and every kind of comfort. He may march less ambitiously, taking his chairs and bedding, his brace of servants, his cook and groom, for about thirty shillings a day, and ride his own horse into the bargain. Or he may post with or without a servant and a guide, tearing along at the rate of eight miles an hour, including stoppages, for twopence- halfpenny a mile each horse, and a couple of shillings for food per diem. Or he may even make a walking tour of it, marching his twenty to twenty-eight miles a day with a caravan ; when, if he be economical, his expenses will be covered by teopence a day. He may cross Persia to the Persian Gulf on mule-back in a month for £3 10a. mule hire, or for half that sum if he has a friend who will ride and tie. The Anglo-Indian in search of 'change' may ride post across Persia from Bushire, in the Gulf, to Enzelli, on the Caspian, in nine to ten days, if he be a determined rider, at a ocet of some 211 for one horse ; if he take a guide, then about 220."
In this lovely land, the whole of which is twice as large as France, while the pleasant portion is the size of Italy, there are probably not four millions of people, the most separate, and in some ways peculiar, of the races of Asia. They are as white as Jews, finely made, extremely active, and as much addicted to sport as English squires. They are brave, and would make splendid cavalry ; very abstemious when abstinence is required, yet given in times of ease to all good things, eating like epicures, and drinking far more than is good for them. Often profligate, always vain, liars from childhood, and utterly indifferent to cruelty, the Persians are still pleasant companions, having, with many other Parisian tastes, much of the Parisian wit and acuteness of intellect. They love literature, they have an instinctive taste for decorative art, and they enjoy conversation, and, when not telling stories, excel in it. They are, in fact, of all Oriental peoples, the one with the greatest capacity for content; and it is this, perhaps, which induces them to put up with one of the weakest and most oppressive Governments in the world. Anything may be done in Persia, not only by the Shah, but by any one of his higher agents. A good Governor commences his career by bricking up or crucifying a few prisoners, selected, no doubt, for inability to bribe, just to warn misdoers that he is in their neighbourhood ; and then proceeds to govern, as Persians think, reasonably well,—taking bribes always, inflicting the bastinado often, and breaking out now and then into some act of horrible cruelty ; but still keeping some sort of external order, so that roads are safe and houses are not pillaged. Those who are great, even if they have no legal authority, have awful powers, and sometimes use them with a capricious cruelty which Europeans suppose to be wholly
of the past. "One such instance occurred under my own observation. A. young woman of the lower ranks was in the habit of frequenting dances and entertainments of the rich. She was pretty, and had a certain reputation. Some one drew the Queen-mother's notice to her escapades. She was sent for, and unfortunately replied to the charges of the Royal lady by a lu quo quo. The Queen-mother handed the girl over to her guard, ordering that she should be wrapped in a carpet and jumped on till life was extinct. The sentence was carried out, and it would not have excited much attention but for the youth, beauty, and notoriety of the victim." Most of the Governors are sons of the Shah ; and if there is a bread-riot, a quiet threat that the bakers shall be baked in their own ovens has its full effect, for not only is there no reason why it should not be done, but it has been done in very deed. The only class which escapes what would, to Europeans, seem unendurable oppression, are the women. They have, in the main, happy lives in Persia. They are secluded, it is true; but they see much company, they own their own property, and they spend nearly as they please. They dress according to their own fancy, which is peculiar,—the regular dress of Persia being almost exactly like that of ballet- dancers, with petticoats only reaching to the knee, very much puffed out, and with legs and feet quite bare. They are allowed much license, and use it, and are never beaten or imprisoned. They are, however, liable to one separate and most awful danger. Though the punishment is seldom employed, and offences of gallantry are, in fact, winked at, the injured husband can, by law, demand an awful doom for the adulteress. We hardly know in literature a more terrible description than this, in which Dr. Wills, without passion, and with no effort at fine-writing, describes a still existing fact :— "Some two miles from Shiraz' near the tombs of the poets, is a large garden—that of Dilgoosha (Heartsease). In this garden, under its luxuriant orange-trees, the Shirazis are accustomed to picnic all the year round; and from this garden a stiff climb brings you to the Well of Death. What the origin of this well was ; who made it; whether it was a place for the drawing of water' a kind of granary, or a mine is doubtful. No one knows its age. No one has sounded its depths successfully. No one knows if it be a dry well, or if there be water in its depths. Every child in Shiraz knows it ; every child 'has flung pebbles in, listening to the sounding echoes as the stones fell into its unfathomed depths. And with a curse the little one has spat, by its mother's instigation, into the grave of faithless women.' There it is, a great square yawning hole in the grey rock, with no balustrade. Thu sparse mountain herbage is trodden away around its brink by generations of the curious who have peeped down in awe. It is not so very long since the punishment was carried out. The wretched woman was placed on a donkey, bare-headed, her face to the tail. Her hair, the Persian woman's chief glory, was shaven ; her face, formerly so jealously veiled, was bare. The donkey was led by the executioner in his red robe of office. Preceding the wretched victim were the hired musicians, buffoons, and dancers of the town, and a few of the lower and more abandoned of the female riffraff of a great Eastern city. The rest of a huge crowd was made up of a mob of men and boys, who shouted and laughed as if they were about to attend some fair. Horsemen too, rode with the shouting crowd as far as the foot of the steep hill. The farrash-bashi (literally, the chief carpet-spreader), the principal executive (police) officer of the governor of the province, with a few policemen, seemed to be among the few respectable persons present : he, of course, attended in hia official capacity. Ribald songs were sung by the hired buffoons, and the musicians played their loudest, as all scrambled up the mountain-track. The prisoner was half-dragged, half-carried up by two of the executioner's assistants, for the path is too steep for any beast of burden. Poor wretch ! she had been mercifully half- stupefied with opium. The mob at length reached the top. The woman was seated, her hands bound behind her back, at the very brink of the well. She was told to recite the Mussulman profession of faith : 'There is no God but God. Mahommed is the apostle of God.' She was silent ; some one muttered it for her. The execu- tioner, half-drunken as he was, as is the custom in Persia, to nerve him to his work, stepped forward. Begone!' he shouted, spurned her with his foot, and she disappeared."
Yet the Persian who bears, and, indeed, in this case ordains, these horrors—for this punishment is not by Royal order— is usually an easy-going, kindly man, fond of his wives and children, and not a bigot to his creed. At least, Dr. Wills, though he says too little on a most interesting subject, confirms previous accounts of the special proclivity of Persians towards utter unbelief. They alone, among Mahomedans, incline towards a scepticism which rejects the supernatural altogether, and is, indeed, the faith defended with such high poetic power by Omar Khayyam. Their likeness to Parisians appears in this also, and we are not sure that we could not find it again, did we seek it, in their tolerance for cruelty.
We have let Dr. Wills speak for himself, and have only to say that his book is utterly unaffected, full of keen
observation, and, if anything, rather too unprejudiced in favour of European modes of thought and action. It will deepen the impression produced by Mr. Morier in favour of the Persians, yet leave, as his book also left in the heart of every reader, a prayer that it may please God speedily to terminate the existing Government of Persia. Russian conquest, English conquest, a new native Government, an outburst of anarchy, anything, must be better than the existing system.
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