Wildfowl in Seistan 67 



After emerging from the reeds, we find ourselves 

 on a level plain, yellow with a low straggling 

 grass this also an area subject to inundation. In 

 the distance rows of little square dots might in 

 another country be bathing - machines on sands 

 when the tide is low ; here they are the reed huts 

 of the cattle owners, and a very poor time these 

 people must have of it in their frail dwellings, 

 especially when blizzards sweep over the country. 1 



As we canter over the level the horizon imper- 

 ceptibly becomes water, with dotted islands of 

 dark reeds. Wildfowl can be seen flying low 

 down, darkening in the shadow and brightening 

 in the sunshine. 



1 One terrible storm that occurred about eighteen years ago is 

 described in the McMahon Boundary Commission records, and is 

 still talked about in Seistan. A survivor's narrative runs that 

 when the storm arose, it was night. A boy sent from the family 

 hut to report what the water was doing, came running back crying 

 that a great wave was advancing from the Hamun, and telling his 

 people to fly for their lives. They put his words down to boyish 

 fears, however, and stayed with their cattle. The Hamun water 

 was being heaped up on the south side from the force of the wind, 

 and the hut was soon awash. The family huddled together on a 

 heap of reeds collected to make tings (shelters) for the cattle. As 

 the cold increased, the water froze, and mingled with the roar of 

 wind and waves was the crash of floating ice. Wild pig, driven 

 from the submerged reed-beds, took refuge with the cattle in the 

 tings, but these one by one collapsed, and the animals were carried 

 away and drowned. The narrator's family were eventually rescued 

 in the reed boats of their brother lake-dwellers the sayads, but it 

 is said that, during the four days that the wind lasted, over four 

 hundred human beings and fourteen thousand cattle perished. 



