CHAPTER V.
TEHERAN.
A brilliant ball-room, pretty faces, smart gowns, good music, and an excellent supper;--thus surrounded, I pass my first evening in Teheran, a pleasant contrast indeed to the preceding night of dirt, cold, and hunger.
But it was not without serious misgivings that I accepted the courteous invitation of the German Embassy.

The crossing of the Kharzan had not improved the appearance of dress-clothes and shirts, to say nothing of my eyes being in the condition described by pugilists as "bunged up," my face of the hue of a boiled lobster, the effects of sun and snow.
One is struck, on entering Teheran, with the apparent cleanliness of the place as compared with other Oriental towns.

The absence of heaps of refuse, cess-pools, open drains, and bad smells is remarkable to one accustomed to Eastern cities; but this was perhaps, at the time of my visit, due to the pure rarified atmosphere, the keen frosty air, of winter.

Teheran in January, with its cold bracing climate, and Teheran in June, with the thermometer above ninety in the shade, are two very different things; and the town is so unhealthy in summer, that all Europeans who can afford to do so live on the hills around the capital.
The environs are not picturesque.

They have been likened to those of Madrid, having the same brown calcined soil, the same absence of trees and vegetation.