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Updated: June 15, 2025
Nature's stern agony writes itself on these furrowed brows of gloomy stone. These reft and splintered crags stand, the dreary images of patient sorrow, existing verdureless and stern because exist they must. In them hearts that have ceased to rejoice, and have learned to suffer, find kindred, and here, an earth worn with countless cycles of sorrow, utters to the stars voices of speechless despair.
There is an avenue leading part way from the city to the summer residence of the English Minister at Gulaek, that conjures up memories of an English lane; but the double row of chenars, poplars, and jujubes are kept alive by irrigation, and all outside is verdureless desert.
Along the sides occasional shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats.
As far as can be learned, this is the first time any Ferenghi has walked clear around the ramparts of Teheran. It is nothing worth boasting about; only a little tramp of a dozen miles, and there is little of anything new to be seen. All around the outside is the level plain, verdureless, except an occasional cultivated field, and the orchards of the tributary villages scattered here and there.
There is nothing particularly grand or imposing in the outlook here; but the late rains have clothed the whole smiling face of nature with a bright, refreshing green, that fails not to awaken a thrill of pleasure in the breast of one fresh from the verdureless streets of a large sea- port city.
So I started my caravan at daybreak, to get the water at its lowest, and ascended the gorge, which is an absolutely verdureless rift in mountains of most brilliant and fantastic stratification. At the first ford Mando was carried down the river for a short distance. The second was deep and strong, and a caravan of valuable goods had been there for two days, afraid to risk the crossing.
One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery rocks, and the others had narrow escapes. However, this was as good a road as we had found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much grumbling. Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding.
It was a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green on top, but too unlovely to have been preserved for any reason save its antiquity and history.
We sailed for some hours along a lava coast, streamless, rainless, verdureless, blazing under the fierce light of a tropical sun, and some time after noon anchored in the scorching bay of Kawaihae.
To east and west the valley, now scarcely more green than those upper plains, bounded by its verdureless bluffs, ran crookedly, following the river course, its only sign of white dominion the rutted trail. Beyond the stream there extended miles of white sand-dunes, fantastically shapen by the wind, gradually changing into barren plains of alkali.
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