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
266 OVERLAND TO INDIA
CHAP.
0
in these airy dwellings, where mothers nurse their naked
children, while others turn handmills, churn butter, prepare
sour milk, spin thread or sew clothes. A small withered
hag sat huddled up in a corner, and looked as though she
were a hundred years old. She was stone blind, could
not walk, and sat crouching on her bed on the ground,
a nest of vermin. The younger women were good to
look at, were unveiled and inquisitive, brown and dirty,
and lightly clothed in rags. They had dark-brown eyes,
large noses, thick lips, with down on the upper. They A
•
wore simple ornaments round the neck and a coloured
bandage round the head, but all were barefooted.
In one or two of the huts hung a long clumsy gun ;
they are generally used for swans. In front of two i
dwellings stood looms of the simplest construction ; very 0
coarse cotton cloth is woven in them. Russian cotton p
cloth in gaudy colours, imported from Meshed, also finds a s
ready sale at the Hamun. s
It was very amusing to go and look about among these singular communities, which live on cattle-breeding,
fowling, and fishing, and where everything vividly reminded 1
me of Abdal and Kum-chapgan. One would think that 2
this people must be better off in all respects than the poor s
peasants in Eastern Persia, who depend on the harvest 1
they can coax out of the niggard earth ; but the people of
the Hamun themselves assured me that they were very t
poor, each hut owning not more than six or ten cows. To i
judge by the large herds one sees, the average per hut i
must be larger. It was also admitted that there are
households which own as many as a hundred cows, but 1
these were all from Seistan. A man from Meshed was I
now staying here to buy cattle, and had already obtained
49 head, for which he had paid 25 to 30 tuman. He said I
that he was going to take them to Meshed in 35 days, i
and that he made a profit of 3 kran on each cow. In
reality his gain was much greater, but he would not let it i
be known when sellers were standing round listening, for
then he would have had to pay more next time.
Later in the day, when the wind was falling, I returned
once more to the huts to take photographs. The inmates
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