SOME NATURAL PHENOMENA. Ill 



with nitre, which crystallizes on the surface. For the rest, if you 

 Jig two or three inches deep, you find water, though very brackish 

 in quality. The general opinion is that the desert was once occupied 

 by a sea, which suddenly disappeared on the night that Mohammed 

 was born. And it seems to me that there is no reason to doubt this 

 sudden disappearance, since even in our own days, and only a few 

 years ago, the salt lake of Ourmiah (Urumiyeh), in the province of 

 Azerbaidjan, vanished completely for twenty-four hours ; it is true 

 that the waters emerged again from their subterranean basin. I 

 think it almost absolutely demonstrated, from inspection of these 

 localities, that at a remote epoch this sea communicated with the 

 Caspian, and formed one united basin of water. I am not sure but 

 that in the south it also communicated with the Indian Sea, for I 

 have not travelled in that direction. The apparition of the Elburz 

 chain has cloven the two basins, and the sea, receiving only incon- 

 siderable streams, insensibly receded, until the day when it was 

 wholly dried up, leaving only two lakes : one, the lake of Sivas, 

 which disappeared in the seventh century ; the other, the lake of 

 Seistan, which is still extant, and receives several of the important 

 rivers of Afghanistan. At all events, the great sea itself had dis- 

 appeared some generations prior to the epoch of Alexander. 



"The great humidity of the soil," adds Doctor Cloquet, "struck 

 me vividly. Does not this humidity appear to indicate the presence 

 of vast subterranean sheets of water, which sweat, so to speak 

 (transsuderaienf), through the porosities of the earth ? " 



The desert table-land of Nadjed, which fills all the central part 

 of Asia, is bounded on the west and south by the more fertile and 

 fortunate countries of the Hedjaz and the Hadramant, which skirt 

 the Indian Ocean. To the north-east lies the desert of the Tih, 

 whose deep sand-drifts lie between Palestine and the Isthmus of Suez, 

 and which the Mediterranean washes on the north, on the south-west 

 the Gulf of Suez, and on the south-east the Gulf of Akaba. This is 

 the small triangular peninsula which was known to ancient geo- 

 graphers as Arabia the Stony. A group of ever-famous mountains, 



