Chapter 19.
Kirmanshahan.
[…] Muhammad Agha begged to be admitted, and we had a cosey chat by the fireside. Later on, by invitation of the Agha, I went down to his majlis. He had a suite of apartments in a remote part of the house, and received me in the most cordial manner, and introduced me to numerous friends sitting round in a large well-painted saloon. He was rejoiced at my knowing Persian, but when I found him making side remarks about me in Arabic, I felt bound to tell him I knew that language also, he was still more interested.
He was a tall fine man, of remarkably good presence, looking haughty, as if accustomed to command, but utterly kind and courteous in his manner. When he found that I knew also the Kurdi dialect, he elected me to sit next to him and eat out of his dish, and even went to the length of secretly ording some arrack, which was brought in an old Johann Farina bottle.
The conversation was general, but the whole household were, at the time of my arrival, much exercised by a case of spirit rapping. Stones as large as an orange, had for three nights running been pitched by supernatural hands into the Agha’s inner courtyard, and though he had put soldiers on guard he had discovered nothing. I saw two of the stones so, as Mark Twain might say, I am bound to believe it.
Unexplored Baluchistan, by Ernest A. Floyer (1882).