LIFE IX CENTRAL ASIA. 265 



punkah. "We hear the coolie asking his wife, while 

 he beats her for not having made enough bread, if 

 she wants him to die starving. Household matters 

 are unconcealed. And the life of half a million of 

 the human race for such population has the town of 

 which we speak is laid open, so that he who walks 

 or rides may read. 



But for Central Asia, Kurrachee, the port of Sincl, 

 is the most convenient point of observation. Sxirely 

 no one ever approached it with the intention of re- 

 maining there for some time, without feeling a little 

 dismay and sinking of the heart. The Eed Sea, the 

 Persian Gulf, and the upper part of the Arabian Gulf, 

 are bounded by the waste places of the earth hot 

 sandy shores, spotted with dreary mangrove swamps, 

 and rising up into red precipitous mountains which 

 seem to flame even in the summer heat. The broken 

 malaria-covered swamps, through which the waters of 

 the Indus find their way into the sea, are succeeded, 

 as we approach Kurrachee, by low sand-hills extend- 

 ing along the coast to Cape Monze, a huge promon- 

 tory of red sandstone ending a vast range of sterile 

 mountains, which stretch away to the north-east for 

 hundreds of miles beyond eyesight till lost among the 

 ranges of distant Afghanistan. Dreary enough looks 

 the aspect of things after we cross the bar and prepare 

 to land. A long bunder-road, with Arab budgerows 

 loading and unloading on one side of it, and on the 

 other a dark muddy swamp, full of dead fish and shell- 



