two, and it is between this and Kuh-i-Ghasemi that the road runs to Naibend.
If we then ascend from the small saddle up to the
summit of the little ridge, the eastern side of which we followed yesterday, we make acquaintance with a rather deeply eroded furrow in weathered sandstone, limestone, yellowish-grey clay-slate, gypsum, red and black limestone conglomerate, all thoroughly disintegrated and ready to
fall to pieces. But the bottom of the furrow is of
harder material thrown into sills, basins, flakes, slabs, and hollows grooved out and moulded into fantastic forms by running water. It is astonishing that the hardy tamarisks can in some places suck the moisture necessary to life out of this aridity.
From the ridge itself I had a fine view, as far as the haze permitted, over the dismal landscape to the east. A steep furrow, where an active pedestrian could scarcely clamber down from the upper part, winds in sudden bends between hills and projections down towards the flat country, which vanishes in haze on the eastern horizon, where the hills lying in this direction are quite invisible.
A singular landscape surrounds us on all sides. In the northern coastal mountains of Asia Minor, south of Trebizond and still more in the Caucasus, the earth's crust is in the bloom of freshness, with solid forms, a decided well-sculptured orographical system, a distinct, boldly outlined hydrography and often juicy thriving vegetation. But here from the top of Kuh-i-Ghasemi the eye meets with nothing but ruins and remains of former mountains, degraded weathered folds in the earth's crust, the fissured, cracked, pulverized splinters of older ranges, desiccated, scorched, sterile and wearisome fragments, slight and indistinct signs of ancient highlands. The vegetation is extremely scanty, and is quite lost to pview, the brown dry and hard shrubs being of the same colour as the ground. The tamarisks, still struggling for life, hide themselves in the shadows of the furrows which collect the drainage after the infrequent rains. Grey, light green, and red hues prevail, and over the whole lies a dusty haze like gauze, subduing the colours and
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