32 OVERLAND TO INDIA CHAP.
There is no more breeze, and, exposed on my tall steed, I have to put up with the burning sunshine. This is germsir, the land of palms, quite a different region and another climate from that on the shores of the Kevir.
Atabek, the Grand Vizier, had provided me with a firman, a kind of letter of recommendation to the Governor of Tebbes and Tun, and Abbas Kuli Bek and Gulam Hussein were sent on in front to request the authorities, on the strength of this document, to place at our disposal a separate and comfortable garden. The two messengers quickened their steps, and soon disappeared as two dark specks in the grey country.
We followed at our usual pace, and were astonished to find the land so dreary in the neighbourhood of the great oasis. Only a small ass caravan came trotting along on its way to some outlying village, the countrymen returning after transacting their business in Tebbes.
The oasis is long, and stretched out parallel to the erosion furrows and irrigation canals, and therefore runs ENE. to WSW. We are coming from the north-west, and the visual angle between the extreme palms on either wing gradually increases. The dark green line is resolved into clumps and groves of palms, some tall, some short, some standing alone and some in close groups, and their crowns are like the winter locks on the foreheads of camels. Above them rise two cupolas and a minaret. Over the same waste land, perfect desert, we draw nearer, and one detail after another becomes visible. It turns out that the two cupolas are situated beside the road, a good way before the oasis, and there we halt a while, for the large camera must be taken out. They stand over the grave of the Sultan Hussein Riza. He was brother to Imam Riza, and his imamsadeh is finely situated on a small mound, where many of the inhabitants of Tebbes sleep in their graves on the south-eastern slope. Nevengk, who is in front, springs up the mound, and begins to howl piteously, perhaps displeased at the jackals which keep themselves hidden in their lurking-places in the desert, perhaps bewailing the slumbering guests whose fate has brought them to this small isolated town, more
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