SHIEAZ TO BUSHIRE. 59 



voluntarily shuddered, and my very blood ran cold, 

 as I strained my eyes into the gloom of night to see 

 whence such sounds could emanate. So near did it 

 seem, that we instantly pushed our horses onwards, 

 and towards the spot from whence the sound ap- 

 peared to issue. But it was to no purpose : not a 

 thing moving could we distinguish in the darkness. 

 Was this the voice of the Ghaulee Beaubee the 

 same lonely demon by whom, the Afghaans aver, 

 every desert and waste solitude of their country is 

 tenanted] In India I had heard, and that often 

 enough, the mournful yellings of jackals, and the 

 strange laughing bark of the hyena ; in Africa I had 

 listened in the still night to the grand roar of the 

 lion, as it came booming across the plain ; but never 

 in my life had I heard anything so appalling as these 

 unearthly shrieks. Yolney, in ' Les Ruines,' speaks 

 of the howling of jackals at night as sounds expres- 

 sive of loneliness and solitude. I am sure the sounds 

 to which we listened that night were highly sugges- 

 tive of the same. The Persians said they were the 

 call of an animal whom they named the Sug-i-toor, or 

 tusked dog. Perhaps it was some old toothless jackal 

 though the call was far more appalling and dismal 

 than anything I had heard from jackals before who 

 had been jilted in his younger days, and was now 

 possessed of an unhappy spirit, that urged him thus 

 to lament his woes. It may possibly have been an 

 animal that, I believe, some call the "lion's pro- 



