CHAPTER IX ON THE TRACK OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
• The storie of Alisaundre is so commune That every wight that hath discrecioun Hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune.'
— Chaucer, Monk's Tale, 3821-3823.
- Left Teheran 7.55 a.m., Friday, May 24' — so reads the
first note of the day's memoranda in my diary on the morning of our departure from the Persian capital. * Eastward Ho I ' was the word as we turned our faces towards Khurasan, or ' the Province of the Sun,' for a journey of almost six hundred miles to Mashad.^ There was a freshness in the air that re- acted in a buoyancy of spirits when we remembered that a portion of our route was to follow the track along which Alexander the Great had swept in pursuit of Darius Codo- mannus III, the last of the Achaemenian kings, nearly twenty- three centuries ago.
Our start was made in two post-phaetons, each with four horses whose harness was fastened with ropes or tied with strings. 2 Hovannes Agopian, or 'John,' our servant, was safely bestowed with the luggage in one vehicle ; my comrade and I had tucked ourselves away amid the smaller baggage in the other. Beggars innumerable swarmed about our wheels or blockaded the poverty-stricken streets through which we had to drive for half an hour before reaching the suburbs of the city. The maimed, the halt, and the blind seemed hopelessly mixed up in the melSe of pack-laden porters, business-eyed
1 For the distance see Curzon, Per- with my old-time servant, Mirza Safar «a, 1. 256. Adilbegh, now a physician, as my
2 On the next journey (1910) I left guide. Teheran, Friday, June 3, at 6,26 a.m.,
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