weather, and was truly refreshing after the nauseous water we had drunk in Alem.
Before us rises a dark chain called Kuh-i-cheft, or Kuh-i-cheft-u-Chugu, after two wells that are found there. Immediately to the right of this range lies Moshajeri, a district set down in detail in all maps of Persia, which therefore we leave as far as possible to the south. A very high and regularly formed table-mountain to the south bears the name of Kuh-i-mahella. Our route leaves Kuh-i-cheft to the right, and still farther to the right is the road from Anarek to Abbasabad and Tebbes. At the foot of Kuh-i-sur, S. 70° E., runs one of the roads from Yezd to Tebbes. With all its desolation this country is intersected by a net of roads and paths—small light bands worn down by the foot-pads of camels ; the knots of the net are the wells, while in the meshes there is nothing but waste land, sand, and steppe, and dry, sterile, and weathered relic hills.
A little farther on, when some screening elevations are behind us, another isolated and mighty hill group comes into sight in the south, with steep sides and a small rock in front of it apparently disconnected ; but the latter merges into the main elevation as soon as it rises higher above the horizon. Now we have reached the small stretch of sand, with dunes 25 feet high, and almost bare of vegetation. It is only an offshoot or patch of the sandy sea, which extends to the foot of a knoll in the south.
Then follows an expanse of hard ground bestrewn with fine pebbles, and crossed by two camel tracks leading out to the northern sands where the camels find the dry plants they love. And then we traverse another patch of dunes, among which the path runs in zigzags to avoid all unnecessary sand ridges. To the right we have still an outline of heights like a continuous range, but probably it would resolve itself into small groups more or less disconnected, if we had an opportunity of making a closer acquaintance with it. Again a pillar of smoke appears in the distance, rising up from a charcoal kiln, where men utilize the hard stems of saxaul and tamarisk to make
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