08 THE PERSIAN DESERT. 



land is nearly a wide scene of desolation. A great salt-desert 

 occupies 27,000 square miles between Irak and Khorasan, of which 

 the soil is a stiff clay, covered with efflorescence of common salt and 

 nitre, often an inch thick, varied only by a few saline plants and 

 patches of verdure in the hollows. This dreary waste joins the large 

 sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman. Khelat, the capital of 

 Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the sea ; round it there 

 is cultivation, but the greater part of that country is a lifeless plain, 

 over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the north wind into 

 ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet high, without a 

 vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose hot and pesti- 

 lential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these dismal sands 

 impassable at certain seasons." 



The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the 

 Indus. That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, 

 is more than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes 

 that the actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern 

 landscapes which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those 

 provinces where the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, 

 the scene would hardly remind the traveller of 



" That delightful province of the Sun, 

 The first of Persian lands he shines upon, 

 Where all the loveliest children of his beam. 

 Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream."* 



" To bare, dry mountain-ridges," says M. Forgues, " succeed 

 plains, sometimes incrusted with hard clay, sometimes clothed with 

 thick sand. At the outset of spring, in the months of April and 

 May, the country is coloured with some softer tints, the grass breaks 

 here and there through the granite and the gravel ; but in the first 

 summer heats everything grows dry, and the soil resumes its monoto- 

 nously brown or gray livery. Water fails for cultivation, which in 

 the best districts is confined to a few scattered oases. In these vast 

 spaces, when the eye surveys them from some mountain-crest, there 



* Moore, " Lalla Rookh " Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. 



