8

JOURNEYS IN PEESIA

LETTER XVI

hostages in the capital for the good behaviour of their
clans. There they learn a few words of French and
English, along with pure Persian and Arabic, and the few
other branches of the education of a Persian noble. They
are fine inanly boys, and ride and shoot well from an early
age. But the worst of them is that they never are " boys."
They are little men, with the stiffness and elaboration of
manner which the more important Khans have copied

STOVE LI OX AND GUIDE.

from the Persians, and one can never fancy their abandon-
ing themselves to " miscellaneous impulses."

Killa Bazuft, Bazuft Valley, June 18.—A few days
ago we left the last village of the region behind, to enter
upon a country not laid down in any maps. It is
a wild land of precipitous mountain ranges, rising into
summits from 11,000 to 13,000 feet high, enclosing-
valleys and gorges or canons of immense depth, some of
them only a few feet wide, a goodly land in part, watered
by springs and streams, and green with herbage and
young wheat, and in part naked, glaring, and horrible.