The season of 1885-86 has been an exceptionally mild winter in the
Persian capital. Up to Christmas the weather was clear and bracing,
sufficiently cool to be comfortable in the daytime, and with crisp,
frosty weather at night. The first snow of the season commenced falling
while a portion of the English colony were enjoying a characteristic
Christmas dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, at the house of the
superintendent of the Indo-European Telegraph Station, and during January
and February, snow-storms, cold and drizzling rains alternated with brief
periods of clearer weather. When the sun shines from a cloudless sky in
Teheran, its rays are sometimes uncomfortably warm, even in midwinter; a
foot of snow may have clothed the city and the surrounding plain in a
soft, white mantle during the night, but, asserting his supremacy on the
following morning, he will unveil the gray nakedness of the stony plain
again by noon. The steadily retreating snow line will be driven back-back
over the undulating foot-hills, and some little distance up the rugged
slopes of the Elburz range, hard by, ere he retires from view in the
evening, rotund and fiery. This irregular snow-line has been steadily
losing ground, and retreating higher and higher up the mountain-slopes
during the latter half of February, and when March is ushered in, with
clear sunny weather, and the mud begins drying up and the various
indications of spring begin to put in their appearance, I decide to make
a start. Friends residing here who have been mentioning April 15th as the
date I should be justified in thinking the unsettled weather at an end
and pulling out eastward again, agree, in response to my anxious
inquiries, that it is an open spell of weather before the regular spring
rains, that may possibly last until I reach Meshed.

During the winter I have examined, as far as circumstances have
permitted, the merits and demerits of the different routes to the Pacific
Coast, and have decided upon going through Turkestan and Southern Siberia