50 By Mountain, Lake, and Plain 



ing into misty purple, to a horizon level as the 

 ocean's. Looking towards Seistan, the blue-green 

 Hamun lies like a little sea on the surface of a 

 sun-baked continent, but it seems to accentuate 

 rather than relieve the desolation of the scene. 

 The dark patches that might be taken for cloud 

 shadows, if they were not stationary, one knows 

 to be reed -beds, and beyond these the cultivated 

 tracts and the tamarisk forest fringing the Hel- 

 mund. In the lake stands out a tiny table 

 rock, the island of Koh-i-Kwaja, on the edge and 

 down the side of which are the ruins of Kah- 

 Kaha, 1 "the city," as some one has freely ren- 

 dered it, "of roars of laughter." Many are the 

 tales and legends about this island fort, for 

 during the roll of many centuries it has borne a 

 prominent part in the stormy history of Seistan. 

 In comparatively recent times, when the figure 

 of Nadir Shah loomed gigantic and terrible 

 over territory stretching from the Persian Gulf 

 to the Oxus, from Delhi to Tabriz, it was here 



1 Kah-Jcaha (or qahqahd) means laughter. Savage Landor 

 mentions in connection with this place a legend common all over 

 Persia of an animal of so ridiculous an appearance, that when dis- 

 played in the ranks of an army it threw the enemy into such con- 

 vulsions of laughter that they died or at any rate were defeated. 

 The weapon was eventually turned against the side using it by 

 means of the employment of a mirror. The "animal," on behold- 

 ing his image, promptly died of laughter himself ! 



