MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THERE was a man at my private school who taught us geography. In order to beguile our lassitude, or to oil the sticky machinery of our minds, he would draw what even at the time appeared to me to be far-fetched comparisons between the shapes of the countries he was describing and the shapes of things with which, in our ordinary life, we were familiar. He would sketch diagrams for us upon the blackboard in which the frontiers of Europe, Asia and Africa were made to conform to homely images, even as those who employ the signs of the Zodiac will oblige the stars to assume the shapes of bulls, or people with watering cans, or heavenly twins. Italy provided him with an easy analogy and it is still possible to speak without fantasy of the Italian toe, or heel, or calf. Being a conscientious and obstinate man he insisted, however, on pushing his method to extremes. He conceived the idea, for instance, that there existed some similarity of semblance between the shape of France and the shape of a goal-keeper with one arm stretched towards the Cherbourg peninsula and the other straining in the direction of Ushant. There was one analogy which he employed which was less fantastic. He contended that the shape of Persia was identical with the shape of a cat seated in front of the fender with pricked ears. There she sat, with one ear stretched towards Erivan and the other towards Baku, contemplating with apparent placidity the ashes of the past and the flames of the future ; and the Lake of Urumieh, in his diagram, represented a central, mis- placed and polyphemic eye. I was not pleased by this particular diagram, since the jocose manner in which it was presented implied some dispraisal of the country in which I was born. I must con- fess, however, that the comparison was not inexact ; and I recognise with disquiet today that the head of the Persian cat, the place where she keeps her brain, is identical with the province of Azerbaijan.
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