Dr. Bruce has not returned from Baghdad, but Mrs. and Miss Bruce welcomed me very kindly, and I am already forgetting my unpleasant reception. I. L. B.
[32] I can imagine now what a hellish laugh that was with which "they laughed Him to scorn."
I was a month in Julfa, but never saw anything more of Isfahan, which is such a fanatical city that I believe even so lately as last year none of the ladies of the European community had visited it, except one or two disguised as Persian women.
Mr. George Curzon wrote of Julfa: "The younger Julfa is a place wholly destitute of superficial attractions, consisting as it does of a labyrinth of narrow alleys closed by doors and plentifully perforated with open sewers. Life there is 'cabined, cribbed, confined' to an intolerable degree, and it is a relief to escape from its squalid precincts."
I dare not write thus if I would! It is now the early spring. The "sewers" are clear rapid streams, margined by grass and dandelions, and shaded by ash trees and pollard willows in their first flush of green. The "narrow alleys" are scrupulously clean, and there is neither mud nor dust. If I go up on the roof I see a cultivated oasis, gardens prolonged indefinitely concealing the desert which lies between them and the bold mountain ranges which surround this lofty and breezy plain. Every breeze is laden with the delicious odour of the bean blossom. A rapid river spanned by noble bridges hurries through the oasis it has helped to create, and on its other side the domes and minarets of Isfahan rise out of masses of fine trees, and bridges and mosques, minarets and mountains, are all seen through a most exquisite pink mist, for hundreds of standard peach trees are in full bloom, and look where one may everything is _couleur de rose_.
I quite admit that Julfa consists of a "labyrinth of alleys." I can never find my way about it. One alley with its shady central stream (or "sewer"), its roughly paved paths on either side, its mud walls pierced by low doors, is very much like another, and however lucky one may be in "happening on" the right road, it is always a weary time before one escapes from between mud walls into the gardens and wheatfields, to the blossoming beans, and the exquisite wild-flowers among the wheat.