2 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



comes down a brown silt -laden flood, and the 

 lake expands its margins by hundreds of square 

 miles, till its waters find an exit by a narrow, 

 meandering channel, encrusted with salt, to a 

 marshy depression that was the Hamun of days 

 gone by. For the Seistan of to-day is not the 

 Seistan of yesterday. As the river slowly swings 

 from side to side, the people move with it, some- 

 times here, sometimes there, the abandoned sites 

 being marked by the bones and graves of bygone 

 cities. 



The upper parts of the present delta, through 

 which the streams course in deep beds, are too 

 high to be irrigated by simple gravitation, the 

 only method known in Seistan, and so run wild 

 in tangled masses of tamarisk, thorn, and willow, 

 with the open spaces deep in a long wiry grass 

 called Jcirta. This is the cover beloved of the 

 subject of this sketch, the Francolinus vulgaris, 

 otherwise known as the Black Partridge. 



He has many enemies; jackals and foxes that 

 swarm in the undergrowth, hawks of many kinds, 

 and worst of all, Seistani shikaris, to whom no 

 time nor season is sacred. But in spite of all, 

 " birds " are sufficiently numerous for their market 

 price in the bazars of the country to be no more 

 than about sixpence a brace. 



The Afghan frontier lies through the upper part 



