276 THE BASIN OF EASTERN PERSIA AND SISTAN. 
SISTAN. 
The basin of Sistan is unique. Its streams, at least during floods, focus in a 
fresh-water lake, exceedingly flat-bottomed and shallow, and without an outlet to the 
sea. About this circles a broad band of reedy swamp, the home of innumerable 
wild fowl and of the strange Sayids who gain a livelihood by netting them. Next 
comes a band of smooth, rich plain, splendidly fertile and capable of supporting a 
dense population, but bounded suddenly and even encroached upon by the grim 
belt of the surrounding desert. Wastes of blown sand, dry pools of glistening salt, 
and vast expanses of dark, lifeless gravel fonii the desert which comprises half the 
area of the basin and completely cuts off the inner, more hospitable regions from the 
surrounding mountains and the rest of the world. In its sterile wastes all the streams 
except the Hehnund wither to nothing and are wasted, except when the floods of 
spring cart)' them clear to the central lake. Outside of these four belts — the lake, 
the swamp, the plain, and the desert — the basin is everj'where bounded by mountains. 
On the west and south, where they lie close to the lowest depression, the mountains 
are low and arid. The streams which rise in them are mere wet-weather torrents, 
which lose themselves in the piedmont gravel a few miles from their source. To 
the east, however, and even more to the north, the mountains are among the grandest 
in the world. From the northeast angle of the basin, near Kabul, the continuation 
of the Hindu Kush Mountains stretches westward for a distance of 400 miles to the 
Afghan depression. Of this slightly explored region, larger than New England, we 
know almost nothing, except that magnificent mountains, from 10,000 to 17,000 
feet in height, pour their melted snows into the tremendous gorges of rushing 
rivers, the Hamd, the Farah, the Khash, and the many branches of the Hehnund. 
Where these streams reach the lower mountains, their valleys widen and are filled with 
fields, orchards, and prosperous villages, and a strip of green abundance intervenes 
between the sterile mountains and the sterile plain. (See plate 6, opposite p. 288.) 
THE HELMUND RIVER. 
The main features of all the larger rivers of the Sistan basin may be illustrated 
by a single example. The Hehnund of the Afghans, the Rtymander of the ancients, 
is the only large river between the Tigris and the Indus. Rising among great 
mountain peaks which tower to heights of over 15,000 feet, the Helmund flows 
through the land of the Hazara Mongols (Holdich, a, p. 42), "a wild mountainous 
country' of which no European has seen much more than the outside edge. It is a 
high, bleak, and intensely inhospitable couutr)', where the snow lies for most months 
of the year, where little or no fuel is to be found, and cultivation is confined to the 
narrow banks of the Helmund and its tributaries." F'arther downstream, near the 
edge of the mountains, Zamindawar, northwest of Kandahar " is a beautiful countr}-, 
stretching up in picturesque valleys and sweeping curves from the Helmund, and 
filled with a swarming population of well-to-do cultivators" (p. 43). From Zamin- 
dawar the river flows southward, and not far below Girishk enters the desert, 
through which it flows for 300 miles to Sistan, first southward, then westward, and 
lastly northward. On the left lie the deserts of Registan and northern Baluchistan, 
which McMahon (a, pp. 13, 14, 16; b, p. 290) and Holdich (rt, p. 104-105) describe 
