morning can more truthfully be described as yellow liquid mud than as
water, and both myself and wheel present anything but a prepossessing
appearance in ten minutes after starting down its grimy channel. I am,
however, congratulating myself upon finding it so shallow, and begin to
think that, in describing the water as nearly over their donkeys' backs,
the travellers were but indulging their natural propensity as subjects of
the Shah, and worthy followers in the footsteps of Ananias.

About the time I have arrived at this comforting conclusion, I am
suddenly confronted by a pond of liquid mud that bars my farther progress
down the mountain. A recent slide of land and rock has blocked up the
narrow channel of the stream, and backed up the thick yellow liquid into
a pool of uncertain depth. There is no way to get around it;
perpendicular walls of rock and slippery yellow clay rise sheer from the
water on either side. There is evidently nothing for it but to disrobe
without more ado and try the depth. Besides being thick with mud, the
water is found to be of that icy, cutting temperature peculiar to cold
brine, and after wading about in it for fifteen minutes, first finding a
fordable place, and then carrying clothes and wheel across, I emerge on
to the bank formed by the land-slip looking as woebegone a specimen of
humanity as can well be imagined. Plastered with a coat of thin yellow
mud from head to foot, chilled through and through, and shivering like a
Texas steer in a norther, feet cut and bleeding in several places from
contact with the sharp rocks, and no clean water to wash off the mud!
With the assistance of knife, pocket-handkerchief, and sundry theological
remarks which need not be reproduced here, I finally succeed in getting
off at least the greater portion of the mud, and putting on my clothes.
The discomfort is only of temporary duration; the agreeable warmth of the
after-glow exhilarates both mind and body, and with the disappearance of
the difficulty to the rear cornea the satisfaction of having found it no