Persian soil is evidently of the kind that, "tickled with a hoe, laughs with a harvest." Even in this sterile desert, covered for the most part with white salt deposits, the little oases of grain and garden looked as fresh and green as though they had been on the banks of a lake or river.

But the green patches were very few and far between, and, half-way between the post-stations, ceased altogether.

Nothing was then visible but a waste of brown mud and yellow sand, cut clear and distinct against the blue sky-line on the horizon.

It is strange, when crossing such tracts of country, to note how near to one everything seems.

Objects six or eight miles off, looked to-day as if you could gallop up to them in five minutes; and the peak of Demavend, on which we were now looking our last, seemed about twenty miles off, instead of over one hundred and fifty.
Kashan was reached on the 7th of February.