They travelled only by night, and encamped by day, sometimes without a tree to spread their tents under.
The only mode of existing was to wrap the head in a wet cloth, and the body in all the heavy clothing to be had, to prevent the waste of moisture; but even thus Martyn says his state was "a fire within my head, my skin like a cinder, the pulse violent." The thermometer rose to 126 degrees in the middle of the day, and came down to about 100 degrees in the evening.

When exhausted with fever and sleeplessness, but unable to touch food, it was needful to mount, and, in a half-dead state of sleepiness, be carried by the sure-footed mountain pony up steep ascents, and along the verge of giddy precipices, with a general dreamy sense that it was magnificent scenery for any one who was in a bodily condition to admire it.
Swift clear streams and emerald valleys began to refresh the travellers as they rose into the higher land above the arid region; and, after one twenty-four hours' halt in a sort of summer-house, where Henry Martyn was too ill to move till he had had a few hours of sleep, they safely arrived at the mountain-city of Shiraz, where he was kindly received by Jaffier Ali Khan, a Persian gentleman to whom he had brought letters of introduction.
Persia, as is well known, has a peculiar intellectual character of its own.

Descended from the Indo-European stock, and preserved from total enervation by their mountain air, the inhabitants have, even under Islam, retained much of the vivacity, fire, and poetry inherent in the Aryan nature.

Their taste for beauty, especially in form and colour, has always been exquisite; their delight in gardens, in music, and poetry has had a certain refinement, and with many terrible faults--in especial falsehood and cruelty, the absence of the Turkish stolidity, the Arab wildness, and the Hindoo pride and indolence--has always made them an attractive people.

Their Mahommedanism, too, is of a different form from that of the Arab and Turk.