214 VREDENBURG: SKETCH OF BALOCHISTAN DESERT. 



of the great valleys which, for want of a better name, are termed 

 " rivers," notwithstanding the somewhat sarcastic ring there is about 

 that appellation. They also occur across the entrance to most of the 

 tributary ravines and at various points across their course up to 

 considerable heights above the main valley. The country is quite 

 uninhabitable for want of water, and yet there is no doubt about 

 the nature of these walls which are similar to works erected to the 

 present day in many regions of Baluchistan and Persia, being in fact 

 nothing but terraced fields. But the careful way in which they are 

 built gives them an appearance of permanency which one would look 

 for in vain amongst the works of the present generation. In many 

 cases they still hold back the soil, formerly cultivated, which has 

 been artificially heaped up against them. This soil is absolutely 

 similar to that which covers the great alluvial plains of •' pat." No 

 such material is to be found anywhere amongst the hills where the 

 walls have been built, and it must have been brought at the cost of 

 considerable labour from the great desert plain south of the moun- 

 tains. The absence of any canals, the great height to which the 

 walls are found up the tributary ravines, shows that the fields were 

 not watered by means of some general scheme of irrigation with 

 canals deriving their supply from some reservoir placed at a greater 

 altitude. Perennial springs, now everywhere dried up, must have 

 existed in all the ravines where these remains are found, which 

 shows how much greater the rainfall must have been formerly. 



The modern inhabitants of Kharan in calling these structures 



'■ . "gorband" or "dams of the infidels " attribute 



Recent date of dessication. 



their erection to the fire-worshippers. Degraded 



as they are to a condition bordering on the status of savages, 



they have lost sight of all accurate historical notions. The attribution 



of any work to the " fire-worshippers" simply means that they look 



upon it as very old, older than the first Mahomedan settlements. 



They have not forgotten, however, what the walls really are, that 



they are terraced fields, and the legend says that the inhabitants who 



buiit them brought all the soil in bags which they carried on their 



i 36 ) 



