Note 87 — The Fifth Book.
Reading edition
These prominent features of an Oriental city will be found in all the views of Sir John Chardin.
The mosques, the minarets, and numerous cupolas form a splended spectacle; and the flat roofs of the houses which are situated on the hills, rising one behind another, present a succession of hanging terraces, interspersed with cyprus and poplar trees.
Russel’s Nat. Hist. of Aleppo.
The circuit of Ispahan taking in the suburbs is not less than that of Paris, but Paris contains ten times the number of its inhabitants. It is not however astonishing that this city is so extensive and so thinly peopled, because every family has its own house, and almost every house its garden; so that there is much void ground. From whatever side you arrive you first discover the towers of the Mosques, and then the trees which surround the houses; at a distance Ispahan resembles a forest more than a town.
Tavernier.
Of Alexandria Volney says, “the spreading palm trees, the terraced houses which seem to have no roof, the lofty slender minarets, all announce to the traveller that he is in another world.”