168 
ILLUSTRATION OF SCRIPTURE. 
desert. It was reported to us that the reservoir of water which gives 
its name to this place was empty, but we found it nearly half full. 
Without this our post here would have been untenable, and we should 
have been obliged to continue our road over the surrounding salt 
desert, than which a more horrid tract of country cannot be conceived. 
The day following we passed over it without inconvenience, though the 
Persians were not without some apprehensions of ihegoule, a species of 
land mermaid, which they affirm entices the traveller by its cries, and 
then tears him to pieces with its claws. They say that the goule has 
the faculty of changing itself into different shapes and colours; some¬ 
times that it comes in a camel’s form, sometimes as a cow, then as 
a horse; and when of a sudden we had discovered something on the 
horizon of the desert which we could not define, all the Persians at 
once exclaimed that it was a goule. Our spying-glasses, however, dis¬ 
covered it to be the stump of a high reed, which some of the Persians 
still thought might be a finesse of the goule. With the gravest faces 
we were assured that on crossing this desert many had seen them; 
and we were informed of the spells by which they had kept them at 
a distance, the most efficacious of which they said was loosening the 
string of their shalwars, or riding trowsers. 
After we had passed the salt desert, we came to the Maleh-el-Moat 
dereli, or the valley of the angel of death. This extraordinary ap¬ 
pellation, and the peculiar nature of the whole of this tract of land, 
broken into deep ravines, without water, of a dreariness without ex¬ 
ample, will perhaps be found forcibly to illustrate that passage in the 
prophet Jeremiah, xi. 6. : — A land of deserts and of pits, a land of 
drought and of the shadow of death, a land that no manpassed through, 
and where no man dwells. “ A land of the shadow of death,” which 
has given rise to much speculation according to Harmer^ will per¬ 
haps be deemed an allegorical expression, alluding, like the Persian 
appellation above mentioned, to the danger of traversing so intricate a 
tract, and the death that must ensue if lost in it. 
* Harmer, vol. iv. p. 115. 
