CHAP. 2.] THE UIINN. 15 



Where it embraces the Eastern or Wagir portion of Kutch, its 



breadth across the Grand and Lesser Runns is from 



Length and width. 



80 to 100 milesj and it has an indefinite length 

 from Gujrat westwards towards the Indus of over 200 miles. 



Its flat unbroken surface of dark silt, baked by the sun and blistered 

 by saline incrustations, is varied only by the mirage, 

 and great tracts of dazzlingly white salt or 

 extensive but shallow flashes of concentrated brine ; its intense silent 

 desolation is oppressive, and save by chance a slowly passing ' qatdr ' 

 (caravan of camels) or some herd of wild asses even less likely to be 

 seen, — there is nothing beyond a few bleached skeletons of cattle^ salt 

 dried fishj or remains of insects brought down by floods, to maintain 

 a distant and dismal connection between it and life which it is utterly 

 unfitted to support.* (See Plate 1.) 



At wide intervals, patches, a couple of feet above the general level, 

 called dkooi or iei/t, are covered with coarse 



Dhooi : Laana. -, ^■^ mi 



rush-like grass. Ihese appear to have been flat 

 banks scarped by wave action or retained by vegetation, such as occur 

 on low muddy coasts. The soil where very salt is called ' Jcara' where 



(1) * " The Runn or ' Eiu' is a corruption of Aranya* or the waste, nor can anything in 

 nature be more dreary in the dry weather than this parched desert of salt and mud, the 

 peculiar abode of the Klmr Gndda or wild ass, whose love of solitude has been commemo- 

 rated by an immortal pen. That this enormous depository of salt is of no recent formation 

 we are informed by the Greek writers, whose notice it did not escape, and who have pre- 

 served in " Erinos" a nearer approximation to the original Ar ant/a than exists in our Ein 

 or Eunn. Although mainly indebted to the Looni for its salt, whose bed and that of its 

 feeders are covered with saline deposits, it is [was] also supplied by the overilowing of the 

 Indus, to which grand stream it may be indebted for its share of water." — Tod's Rajasthan, 

 Vol. II, p. 296. 



(* Wirana (from the Persian) in Fories' Hinditsfani Bicfionavy . It has never been heard called 'Ein;' 

 but the u of Runn partakes somewhat of the sound of e in wren. "When written Rann, of eourse the a is 

 to be considered the short «,) 



(2) Although much of the Eunn becomes quite dry and none of it marshy, in the 

 ordinary acceptation of the term, Mr. Fedden observed lights, which he took to be ignes 

 fatui, when crossing at night from Bela to Nuggur Parkur in February 1868. 



( 15 ) 



