E------and Abdul go ahead to try and secure better
quarters, and shortly the latter returns, and announces that they have
been successful.  So I, and the charvadars, with the horses, follow him
through a crooked street of thatched houses, at the end of which we find
R------seated beneath the veranda of a rude hotel kept by
an Armenian Jew.  As we approach I observe that my companion looks happier
than I have seen him look for days.  He is pretty thoroughly disgusted
with Persia and everything in it, and this, together with his fever, has
kept him in anything but an amiable frame of mind.  But now his face is
actually illumined with a smile.

On the little table before him stand a half-dozen black bottles, imperial pints, bearing labels inscribed with outlandish Russian words.

“This is civilization, my boy—­civilization reached at last,” says
E------, as he sees me coming.

“What, this wretched tumble-down hole.”  I exclaim, waving my hand at the village.

“No, not that,” replies E------; “this--this is civilization,” and he
holds up to the light a glass of amber Russian beer.

Apart from Russians, we are the first European travellers that have touched at Bunder Guz since McGregor was here in 1875.  We keep a loose eye out for the gimlet-tailed flies, but are not harassed by them half so much as by fleas and the omnipresent mosquito.  These two latter insects have dwindled somewhat from the majestic proportions described by McGregor; they are large enough and enterprising enough as it is; but McGregor found one species the size of “cats,” and the other “as large as camels.”  Bunder Guz is simply a landing and shipping point for Asterabad and adjacent territory.  A good deal of Russian bar iron, petroleum, iron kettles, etc., are piled up under rude sheds; and wool from the interior is being baled by Persian Jews, naked to the waist, by means of hand-presses.  Cotton and wool are the chief exports.  Of course, the whole of the trade is in the hands of the Russians, who have driven the Persians quite off the sea.  The Caspian is now nothing more nor less than a Russian salt-water lake.

The harbor of Bunder Guz is so shallow that one may ride horseback into the sea for nearly a mile.  The steamers have to load and unload at a floating dock a mile and a half from shore.  Very pleasant, in spite of the wretched hole we are in, is it to find one’s self on the seashore —­to see the smoke of a steamer, and the little smacks riding at anchor.

The day after our arrival, a man comes round and tells Abdul that he has three fine young Mazanderan tigers he would like to sell the Sahibs.  We send Abdul to investigate, and he returns with the report that a party of Asterabad tiger-hunters have killed a female tiger and brought in three cubs.  The man comes back with him and impresses upon us the assertion that they are khylie koob baabs (very splendid tigers), and would be dirt cheap at three hundred kerans apiece,