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
LIII TO THE SHORE OF THE HAMUN 263
canvas flapped and beat, and the tent was firmly anchored only at the four corners. It howled and whined in all crannies, and nothing could be heard but the noise of the storm, while the sand and dust rained down on me. I tried in vain to make myself heard. But the wind came to my assistance and roused up the men when their own tent was torn up from its moorings and carried away. Then they noticed my exposed state and came and packed me up again. It was one of the most violent storms I had ever experienced, and the velocity was certainly as much as 8o feet a second.
It was not easy to get to sleep amid the roaring noise,
and I lay expecting the tent to fall down on me and wondering where the myriads of gnats had gone to. They are so fragile, and here there is no shelter ; they must have flown in all directions, and those that remained must have got their tender wings broken. After midnight it rained heavily, and there were puddles of water on my box lid in the morning.
The air was unexpectedly clear, and after a minimum of
44.2° it was cool. Avul Kasim was clothed in a fur coat when he came to wake me with the news that it was quite winter again. The wind was due north, the wind we had often heard of which turns the mills, and if it continued, as at present, it must make everything spin. The clouds at the same time sailed north-eastwards.
Meanwhile we accepted the condition calmly, though we had not expected that we should feel any coolness down here so late in the year. We were delayed because the men, who were ordered to fetch us with their tutins or canoes, were not to be heard of, and no wonder, for the great open lake was too lumpy for their fragile barks.
It was late in the day when our tutindar or canoe-man turned up and said that the lake could not be crossed. The canoes are constructed of bundles of rushes tied together and combined into a large raft which has con-
siderable buoyancy. But in such weather as we had that day we should have had whole seas over us, and the canoes would have been torn asunder bit by bit, so that the boxes and baggage would have been lost, and we ourselves
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