brilliant light, agreeably supplied its place, and enabled them to proceed from caravansary to caravansary with facility. At every step historical associations crowded upon the traveller's mind. The dust which was thrown up into a cloud by the hoof of his camel, and the stones over which he stumbled in the darkness, were the dust and the wrecks of heroes and mighty cities, crumbled by time, and whirled about by the breath of oblivion. Cyrus and Alexander, khalifs, khans, and sultans, had fought, conquered, or perished on those plains. Vast cities had risen, flourished, and vanished like a dream. A few days before his arrival at Kom he passed at a little distance the ruins of Rhe, a city scarcely less vast in its dimensions, or less magnificent or populous than Babylon, but now deserted, and become so unhealthy in consequence, that, according to a Persian poet, the very angel of death retired from it on account of the badness of the air.
On his arrival at Koms, after escaping from the storms of the Black Sea and the Mingrelians, Chardin was nearly killed by the kick of a horse. He escaped, however, and set out two days afterward for Kashan, traversing fine fertile plains, covered with villages. In this city, celebrated for its burning climate and scorpions, he merely remained one day to allow his horses a little repose, and then departed and pushed on to Ispahan, where he arrived on the 23d of June.
Chardin was faithful to the Capuchin friars; for whenever he passed through or visited a city in which they possessed a convent, it was the first place to which he repaired, and the last he quitted. On the present occasion he took up his residence, as usual, with these monks, at whose convent he found on his arrival a bag of letters addressed to him from various parts of the world: before he could read the half of which, many of his Persian and Armenian friends, whom he had known during his
