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Updated: June 25, 2025
The journey occupies thirty-two hours. We reached Baku on September 16, the ninth day from London, and arranged to leave for Enzelli, on the Persian coast, the port for Tehran, at midnight the next day.
The western coasts of the Caspian are flat and monotonous. There are two ports of call between Baku and Enzelli Lenkorán, a dismal-looking fishing-village of mud huts, backed by stunted poplars and a range of low hills; and Astará, the Russo-Persian frontier. Trade did not seem very brisk at either port. We neither landed nor took in cargo at either.
"They can have my old grey mare for two hundred keráns, but you won't catch me letting her for hire," added a third. After considerable haggling as to price, he disappeared, to return with two of the sorriest steeds I ever set eyes on. "We ought to reach Enzelli in about three days, if we do not get our throats cut," said the Khivan, who was to accompany us, encouragingly.
Petersburg, seventeen hundred miles, is but £4 10s., and the other classes are low in proportion. The carriages are comfortable, and the refreshment-rooms excellent. With accurate information as to the sailings from Petrovsk to Baku and Enzelli, one can now go from London to Tehran in fourteen days.
The steamer for Enzelli was to leave at eleven. Having wished my French friend farewell, and a speedy return to his native country, we set out for the quay. The landing stage is crowded with passengers a motley crowd of Russian officials, soldiers, peasants, and Tartars.
One could scarcely discern, through the driving mist, the long low shore and white line of breakers that marked the entrance to Enzelli. To land was out of the question. No boat would live in such a sea. "I will lay-to till this evening," said Captain Z "If it does not then abate, I fear you must make up your mind to return to Baku, and try again another day." A pleasant prospect indeed!
The Enzelli Lagoon is a swarming haunt of numerous kinds of wild-fowl and fishing birds. Conspicuous among the waders in the shallows and on the shore are the pelican and the stork. The place is a paradise to them, teeming with fish and frog food. One of my companions described what he had witnessed in a struggle with a wounded stork in the shallow water of this lagoon.
The Caspian may indeed be called a Russian lake, for although the whole of its southern coast is Persian, the only Persian vessel tolerated upon it by Russia is the yacht of the Shah, a small steamer, the gift of the Caucase-Mercure Company, which lies off Enzelli.
I met at Enzelli a foreign artist, whose acquaintance I had formed in Tehran, where he made some good pictures of local life and scenery. He was loud in his complaints of the elements the heavy rain and the awful mud. He had come down the road with a minimum of travelling comforts, and had been rather miserable.
Enzelli is an uninteresting place. It has but two objects of interest (in Persian eyes) the lighthouse (occasionally lit) and a palace of the Shah, built a few years since as a pied-
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