Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 289
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[Page 289]
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building tradesmen, the pay being three krans (=1/3d) a day.
Persian carpenters did not work standing at a bench with a vice; they sat on the ground and the piece of wood being sawn was held firmly between the sole of one foot and a broad flat peg driven into the earth, and the saw was pulled for the cutting stroke not pushed. Walls of buildings were constructed with sun-dried square bricks made with a mixture of tempered clay and chopped straw; hence the biblical assertion that bricks cannot be made without straw. No scaffolding was used, and the bricklayer stood on the thick wall and went up with it. Roofs, nearly flat, were made of about eighteen inches of closely packed earth on top of two or three layers of palm-leaf matting spread over closely spaced withes supported by Poplar-pole rafters, spaced about thirty inches apart, on top of the walls. The top was finished off with two or three coats of clay and chopped-straw plaster. If the roof was finished and dried out before the onset of Winter, it was unlikely that rain would penetrate it: but snow falling on it needed to be shovelled off without delay.
In addition to persevering with Russian, I now began to learn the Persian language, a very simple one, but in the meantime had an interpreter and guide, Joseph Ismal, who accompanied me everywhere. He was an educated fellow, and I once asked him what he thought of Fitzgerald's translations of Omar Khayyam. He thought that the original was not nearly so lyrical, and that Omar was really not much of a poet: he liked Hafiz much better. If Russian is one of the most difficult of modern languages to learn then Persian must be one of the simplest and easiest. Where in English there are sometimes several different words to give slightly different shades of meaning to a thing or an action, in Persian there is usually only one word for several different but loosely associated things. For example the word "chasmeh" could mean an eyebrow, the arch of a bridge, or a spring on the mountainside (the eye of the mountain) according to context or circumstance.
In this British occupation of North West Persia, in a recent