prevailing wind. At a gumbez (a tomb) the other men are waiting. And then twilight comes again, and all the tones become indistinct ; another night is falling over desolate Baluchistan. Our riders spur on their dromedaries to a rapid run through the bushy steppe, and when the darkness becomes dense we are again in the sandy desert. We cannot see the dunes and their outlines, but we know they are there by the gait of the dromedaries, and the animals seem frequently to be in danger of coming down a hill head foremost.
Now the great thing was to find a place with fuel, and then we arranged our simple camp among some dunes. I had not taken my tent with me, for it is always a pleasure to lie in the open with the sky for a roof and the camp fire for a light. But just as I was taking my evening meal a violent storm came from the north-north-west, and I had to hurry before everything was filled with sand. In the afternoon, on the bank of the Shela, the temperature was 85.8° ; at nine o'clock it had fallen to 68.9°, and in the night it fell to 55.2°. The coolness of night is a blessing after the heat of the day. But in the suffocating cloud of sand that whirled about us, I preferred to have my fur coat over and under me, and before day dawned in the east we were half buried in sand.
Immediately beyond the camp we came to continuous sand with dunes as much as 3o feet high, but we found that we were no longer in absolutely deserted country, for we soon met a solitary old man with a donkey, and came up with three men and a dromedary. We had come into the road connecting the station Kirtaka with Bender and the Hilmend. A jambas can cover this length of quite 6o miles with ease in a day. There are two salt wells on the road, which are only resorted to in case of necessity. The three men said that several Baluchis live at Bender, and that they had left this " harbour " the day before.
The outlines of the hills to the south come again into sight, clearly but faintly, and at seven o'clock the temperature is above 68°. The left side of the body feels more comfortable than the right, which is in shadow and exposed to the morning breeze.
IIIFカラー高解像度
