Sport in Eastern Persia

Black Partridges 9
To resume our trip. We reached the goal of
our journey next day. The Helmand ran close
by, between banks thickly fringed
with willow
and tamarisk, but having been tapped by many
canals, the river is here dwindled to a stream
twenty or thirty yards broad and easily fordable.
This is the frontier line, and the governor of the
neighbouring Afghan province had brought his
camp a few miles from ours within his own
limits.
Of the following few days, which were mainly
devoted to official matters, I shall only mention
a single incident, one that had the effect of
placing on a pinnacle of fame a member of
our party, the Consulate doctor. The Afghan
governor was old and toothless, and among his
nationality, in fact among all Mahommedans,
an appearance of age is a cause of much sorrow
is not the love of wives thereby turned into
contumely? Anyhow, a year previously he had
confided to me that he had heard that " in
London " such things as artificial teeth were made.
The matter being placed in our doctor's hands,
there arrived in due course an apparatus for
taking casts of jaws. It apparently took the
form of saucer-like receptacles filled with plaster
of Paris. Now rumour in Seistan had it that
to obtain the lower jaw's impression, without