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The bright, blue waters of Lake Ooroomiah stretch away southward to where the dim outlines of mountains, a hundred miles away, mark the southern shore; rocky islets at a lesser distance, and consequently more pronounced in character and contour, rear their jagged and picturesque forms sheer from the azure surface of the liquid mirror, the face of which is unruffled by a single ripple and unspecked by a single animate or inanimate object; the beach is thickly incrusted with salt, white and glistening in the sunshine; the shore land is mingled sand and clay of a deep-red color, thus presenting the striking and beautiful phenomena of a lake shore painted red, white, and blue by the inimitable hand of nature.
Lake Ooroomiah is somewhere near the size of Salt Lake, Utah, and its waters are so heavily impregnated with saline matter that one can lie down on the surface and indulge in a quiet, comfortable snooze; at least, this is what I am told by a missionary at Tabreez who says he has tried it himself; and even allowing for the fact that missionaries are but human after all and this gentleman hails originally from somewhere out West, there is no reason for supposing the statement at all exaggerated.
When either of these settles himself affectionately on the end of a person's nose, and the person, smarting under the indignity, hits himself viciously on that helpless and unoffending portion of his person, as a general thing it doesn't hurt the fly, simply because the fly doesn't wait long enough to be hurt; but the Lake Ooroomiah fly is a comparatively guileless insect, and quietly remains where he alights until it suits one's convenience to forcibly remove him; for this redeeming quality I bespeak for him the warmest encomiums of fly-harassed humans everywhere.
The wheeling is reasonably good, and I gradually draw away from the shore of Lake Ooroomiah.
The plain I am now traversing is a broad, gray-looking area surrounded by mountains, and stretching away eastward from Lake Ooroomiah for seventy-five miles. It presents the same peculiar aspect of Persian scenery nearly everywhere-a general verdureless and unproductive country, with the barren surface here and there relieved by small oases of cultivated fields and orchards.
My road after leaving the avenue winds around the end of projecting hills, and for a dozen miles traverses a gravelly plain that ascends with a scarcely perceptible gradient to the summit of a ridge; it then descends by a precipitous trail into the valley of Lake Ooroomiah.
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