IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Overland to India : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
156 OVERLAND TO INDIA
CHAP.
zones of every kevir in Persia. I certainly cannot make out where Galindo travelled. According to Lord Curzon, it was from Khur to Damgan, but probably by an indirect road, for on the straight road between Khur and Turut the kevir is 7o miles broad, not 26 as Galindo gives it. And in the great Kevir men never travel with horses.
Lieutenant Galindo also crossed the great Lut desert twice—in 1887 and 1888—the first time in six, the second in five days, in a country where there was not a drop of
water to be found for 120 miles. Lord Curzon gives the following clear and complete résumé of his narrative :1 " He could not fail to notice the extraordinary resemblance presented by the blown sand to the waves of a chopping sea. These sand billows alternate with bare expanses of black gravel, and with a phenomenon not previously described. This is a region of curious, square-cut clay bluffs, believed by the natives to be the ruins of an ancient city, and called by them the Shehr-i-Lut, but consisting in reality of ` natural formations of hard clay, cut and carved by the fierce north-west wind into strange shapes suggestive of walls and towers.' Lieutenant Galindo found everywhere beneath the sand a substratum of hard rock-salt, some eight or nine inches below the surface, thus proving the saline character of the desert, and here and there patches of genuine kevir, the ground being mapped out in irregular polygons with dividing walls of solid salt, or studded with hard, round, white bubbles of the same material, like a lot of half-buried ostrich eggs, or covered with a sort of moss of delicate-looking salt spiculæ, standing up like needles an inch long, but strong as steel spikes. The worst part of this desert is its south-east corner between Neh and
Barn, which is one of the most awful regions on the face
of the earth. Here the prevailing north-west winds have swept the sand together, and banked it up in huge mounds and hills, ever shifting and eddying. A fierce sun beats down upon the surface, which is as fiery hot as incandescent metal ; and almost always the bad i-sam or simoom is blowing, ` so desiccated by its passage over hundreds of miles of burning desert, that if it overtakes man or animal its
1 Persia, vol. ii. p. 252.
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