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Updated: May 19, 2025
I had about a hundred men, marching by the flank, with a small advanced guard, and also a few flankers, where the ground permitted. I put my Florida company at the head of the column, and had by my side Captain Metcalf, an excellent officer, and Sergeant Mclntyre, his first sergeant. We plunged presently in pine woods, whose resinous smell I can still remember.
After the customary interchange of news, and the discussion of refreshments, Mr. Mclntyre hands me a telegram from Teheran, which bears a date several days old. It is from the British Legation, notifying me that permission is refused to go through the Turcoman country; an appendage from the Charge d'Affaires suggests that I repair to Astrakhan and try the route through Siberia.
The morning of my departure opens bright and warm after a thunder-storm the previous evening, and Mr. Mclntyre accompanies me to the outskirts of the city, to put me on the right road to Mijamid, my objective point for the day, eleven farsakhs distant.
Fog 6 o'clock A.M. half daylight, and the anchor chain comes clanking on board a cheery sound, the steady clink clank of the pall-pin in the winch a comforting sound, and bit of machinery to anyone who has hauled in anchor overhand what say you Baldy or Mclntyre, do you remember Rue Breichnich or Lowlandman's Bay, before we got a winch, and the last three fathoms out of green mud? and the kink in the back before breakfast, and the feeling you'd never stand straight again in your life?
Mclntyre is a canny Scot, a Royal Engineer, and weighs fully three hundred pounds; but with this avoirdupois he is far from being inactive, and together we ramble up the Asterabad Pass to take a look at the Bostam Valley on the other side. The valley isn't much to look at; no verdure, only a brown, barren plain, surrounded on all sides by equally brown, barren mountains.
But all this was confused by the opening rifle-shots of our advanced guard, and, as clear observation was impossible, I made the men fix their bayonets and kneel in the cover on each side the pathway, and I saw with delight the brave fellows, with Sergeant Mclntyre at their head, settling down in the grass as coolly and warily as if wild turkeys were the only game.
One of our ablest sergeants, Henry Mclntyre, who had earned two dollars and a half per day as a master-carpenter in Florida, and paid one dollar and a half to his master, told me that he had deliberately refrained from learning to read, because that knowledge exposed the slaves to so much more watching and suspicion.
Mclntyre absent; behold all male humans absent save myself and a couple of sable eunuchs, whose smooth, whiskerless faces betray inward amusement at the extreme novelty of the situation, and we all alone between the high brick walls that encircle the secrecy of an inner court and yet not all alone, fortell it in whispers some half-dozen shrouded female forms are clustered together in one corner.
Only those who have experienced it know anything of the pleasure of two Europeans meeting and conversing in a country like Persia, where the habits and customs of the natives are so different, and, to most travellers, uncongenial, and only to be tolerated for a time. I have met Mr. Mclntyre in Teheran, so we are not total strangers, which, of course, makes it still more agreeable.
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