CHAPTER VI
ON THE CASPIAN TO PERSIA
' O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea.'
— Btkon, The Corsair, 1.1.1.
- Where are the Russian soldiers going ? ' — was our inquiry,
as squad after squad of one of the Czar's regiments marched up the gangplank of our steamer, the Tamara of the Kavkas- Merkur Line at Baku, late on the evening of our departure.
- To Lankuran on the Persian frontier, where disturbances are
rife,' was the response. * Oh,' thought I — but I checked myself without adding any comment on the international rela- tions between the Russian Bear, the Persian Cat, and the British Lion, although the problem is as old as the Arab histo- rian and geographer Masudi, who, exactly one thousand years before, when traveling through Iran, in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea, touched upon the subject of the Russians in connection with Persia. He tells how the Russians, about the year 913 (300 A.H.), made an invasion by sea, ravaging the whole territory south and west of the Caspian, from Tabaristan to Azarbaijan, and harrying the regions from Baku northward to their own borders. ^ Still earlier, another Arab writer, Tabari (838-923), by birth a Persian of Tabaristan, quotes the prince of the province around Derbent as saying that he found himself 'between two enemies, the Khazars and the Russians.' ^ The Russo-English Agreement, which was entered into in 1907 in regard to Persian affairs, and the uprisings and
1 Masudi, Muruj adh-Dhahab, ch. way in his travels in Persia and India 17, tr. Barbier de Meynard, Prairies between 904 and 925 a.d. cTor, 2. 18-25. Masudi visited the * Tabari, Chronique, ch. 67, tr.
Caspian provinces on his homeward Zotenberg, 3. 496, 498, Paris, 1871.
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