Every six months or so a
letter from the Queen, beautifully written in Persian characters,
reached Calcutta, to which my sister duly replied. In strict
confidence, I may say that I strongly suspect that Lady
Lansdowne's letters were written by her Moonshee, and that she
merely copied the Persian characters, which she could do very
neatly. The Arabic alphabet is used in writing Persian, with three
or four extra letters added to express sounds which do not exist
in Arabic; it is, of course, written from right to left. I had an
hour and a half's daily lesson in Urdu from an efficient, if
immensely pompous, Moonshee, but I never attempted to learn to
read or write the Persian characters.
I do not think that any one who has not traversed the plains of
Northern Indian can have any idea of their deadly monotony. Hour
after hour of level, sun-baked wheat-fields, interspersed with
arid tracts of desert, hardly conforms to the traditional idea of
Indian scenery, nor when once Bengal is left behind is there any
of that luxuriant vegetation which one instinctively associates
with hot countries.
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