Suspicious characters--A trap--Held up--No water--The haunt of
robbers--Fierce daily winds--Volcanic formation--A
crater--Wall-like barriers--A salt stream--A caravan from Quetta.
We remained at Sahlabad the whole afternoon, and we were visited in camp
by a number of suspicious-looking people, who were most inquisitive to
know what I possessed and how much money I carried, and other such
pertinent questions which they put to Sadek and my camel man. Also a
peculiar lot of fellows, with very ugly countenances and armed to their
teeth, passed by. They were mounted on fine horses with gaudy saddles,
and on coming suddenly and unexpectedly upon us seemed quite upset.
Instead of salaaming us, as had been usual with the few well-to-do people
we had so far met, they whipped their horses and galloped away.
Sadek said they must be Sawars--mounted soldiers. Abbas Ali said they
were robbers from Afghanistan. We shall see later what they were.
At 6.30 p.m. we left--it was quite dark--and we had gone but two miles
when a distant voice called upon us to stop. By his speech the stranger
seemed very excited when he reached us, and said we must keep the track,
to the left and not follow the one to the right where two trails branched
off. We could not see his face, for he kept some twenty or thirty yards
off, and besides, his face was wrapped all round in the tail of his
turban. We professed to be thankful for the information, but continued on
the track to the right, which seemed greatly to disturb him--at least,
judging by the number of times he entreated us to follow his advice.
Both Sadek and Abbas Ali corroborated my conviction that this was a trap
laid for us. The man, on seeing us go a different way from the one he
advised us, ran away, and presently we heard some shrill whistles which
were no doubt signals to his companions.
We had gone but another mile when suddenly a figure with a gun in hand
sprang before us and seized the camel man by the chest.
"Whose caravan is this?" he shouted.
"It is the _ferenghi's_," hastily replied the camel man.
There was a short pause in the conversation when our interlocutor,
looking up at my camel which had got close upon him, perceived himself
covered by my rifle.
Sadek had leapt off his camel as quick as lightning and shoved the muzzle
of his Winchester in the man's face. As the stranger's demeanour was most
peculiar and his answers incoherent as well as flippant, Sadek first
disarmed his adversary, then turned his own rifle the round way about
and gave the man a good pounding for his impertinence in holding up my
camel man. We heard a number of voices of people hidden all around. When
the fellow managed to effect an escape he gave an alarm signal, and we
saw a lot of black figures jump up and stampede for their lives.
This furnished a little variation in our dreary night marches, and we
proceeded briskly, Sadek, Abbas Ali and I being most grateful to our
unknown friends for the amusement they had provided us.
Some three miles further we came upon several caravans that had halted
and were hiding, for they were aware of robbers being about--they had
seen fresh tracks of their horses during the day and were in fear of
being attacked. At first when we appeared on the scene they mistook us
for brigands, and as we discovered them hidden we also mistook them for
robbers, so that the beginning of our interview did not lack in humour.
We had a hearty laugh over it all when their identity and ours were
established, and after a few minutes' halt we continued our journey on
soft sand, rather undulating, with frequent depressions in places. We
travelled the whole night of December 1st, passing to the right of the
salt deposits--which looked like a big stretch of country covered with
snow and threw out a certain luminosity, possibly because the salt
crystals reflected and condensed what light there was from the stars. As
the hours of the night went by we gradually left the salt stretch behind
us to the north, and proceeded on the flat for some distance.
In the morning we passed a small village right up on the mountain side,
one mile and a half to the west of our course. We then entered a dry
river-bed between high sand hills, and having marched nineteen hours
continuously camels and men were rather in need of a rest.
At one p.m. on December 1st we pitched our camp in the middle of the
river-bed--80 feet broad here--the only place where we could get a
draught of air,--but the heat was suffocating, the thermometer
registering 112°--the altitude being 5,010 feet.
As we expected to find water of some kind we had omitted to fill up the
skins and load the camels unnecessarily, but, unluckily, there was no
water anywhere at hand. Abbas Ali was sent to the village we had
passed--now some four miles back--to get some, but being too tired to
carry the heavy skin down to us again he entrusted it to a boy, giving
him full directions where our camp was. The boy did not find where we
were, and in the meantime Sadek and I had our throats parched with
thirst. Abbas Ali returned at seven o'clock and had to be despatched back
to the village in search of the lost boy and the water skin. It was ten
o'clock when he returned, and after twenty-eight hours of dryness we had
our first drink of water. It was brackish but it tasted delicious.
We were compelled to remain here for the night. Several caravans passed
through going north, and also a lot of suspicious people, whose manner
was so peculiar that we were compelled to sit up the greater part of the
night and keep watch on my property. Some of the caravan men who had gone
through had warned us that we had encamped in a regular nest of robbers,
and that three men had been robbed and murdered at this spot only a few
days before.
The high sand hills afford excellent hiding places for these gentry. It
appears that the men on horseback whom we had seen at Sahlabad, and who
had bolted on coming suddenly upon us, were the high chief of the robber
band and some of his confederates,--very likely on their way to Birjand
to dispose of booty. Being so near the Afghan border these fellows enjoy
practical safety by merely going from one country into the other to suit
their plans and to evade search parties occasionally sent out for their
capture.
We had come forty miles from Sahlabad, and Abbas Ali brought us the news
from the village that we should find no water on our course for fifteen
miles more and no habitations for forty-eight more miles. Unluckily, we
had hardly enough provisions to last one day, and we perceived a fair
prospect before us of having to go one day without food, when Abbas Ali
was despatched for a third time for another eight miles' walk to the
village and back to see what he could get in the way of edibles.
He returned, riding a cow, in company with another man, and a third
fellow on a mule carrying a fat sheep. The latter was there and then
purchased and killed, and we had a copious breakfast before starting
along the winding dry bed of the river at 11.30 a.m. on December 2nd.
Before us to the south by south-west (190° b.m.) was a lofty flat-topped
mountain which appeared about fifteen miles off, and directly in front of
our course was also another and more extensive long, flat-topped mountain
stretching from north-east to south-west, three miles off, with
precipitous sides towards the north-west and north. The sides were padded
with sand accumulations which reached almost to the summit of the lower
portions of the mountain barrier. To the south-west, approximately twenty
miles off, stood a high range.
West and north-westerly winds blew every day in a fierce manner, usually
from sunset till about ten or eleven o'clock the following morning, at
which hour they somewhat abated. They are, no doubt, due to the great
jumps in the temperature at sunset and sunrise. On December 1st, for
instance, from 112° in the sun during the day the thermometer dropped to
20° at night, or 12° of frost. On December 2nd at noon it was up again as
high as 114°.
We traversed a plain twelve miles long and at its south-east course,
where the mountain ranges met, there occurred a curious
spectacle--evidently of volcanic formation. On the top of the black hills
of gravel and sand lying in a confused mass, as if left so by an
upheaval, rose a pinnacle of bright yellow and red stone, with patches
of reddish earth and of a dissimilar texture to the underlying surface of
the hill. There seemed little doubt that both the rocky pinnacle and the
red earth had been thrown there by some force--and under the projecting
rocks and masses of soft earth one could, in fact, find a different
formation altogether, bearing the same characteristics as the remainder
of the hill surface.
This was on the northern slope of that hill. As the track turned here due
east, and rounded, as it were, this curious mount, we found in reality on
the other side a large, crater-like basin with lips of confused masses of
earth both vermilion and of vivid burnt sienna colour, as well as most
peculiar mud-heaps in a spiral formation all round the crater, looking as
if worn into that shape by some boiling liquid substance. To the
south-east, on the very top of a hill of older formation, was perched at
a dangerous angle another great yellow boulder like the one we had seen
on the north side of the crater. For a diameter of several hundred yards
the earth was much disturbed.
One mile further south-east, in traversing a basin a mile broad, it was
impossible not to notice a curious range of hills with some strange
enormous baked boulders--(they had evidently been exposed to terrific
heat)--standing upright or at different angles to the east side of the
hills, stuck partly in the sand and salt with which the ground was here
covered.
Irregular and unsystematic heaps of rock, on which sand had accumulated
up to a certain height, were to be seen to the south, and huge boulders
of rich colour lay scattered here and there; whereas near the mountains
which enclosed the basin both to south and east there were thousands of
little hillocks of rock and sand in the most disconnected order.
As we went on, two perpendicular flat-topped barriers were before us to
the east--like gigantic walls--one somewhat higher than the other, and of
a picturesque dark burnt sienna colour in horizontal strata.
The whole country about here seemed to have been much deranged at
different periods. We passed hillocks in vertical strata of slate-like
brittle stone, in long quadrangular prisms, but evidently these strata
had solidified in a horizontal position and had been turned over by a
sudden commotion of the earth. This conclusion was strengthened by the
fact that the same formation in a horizontal position was noticeable all
along, the strata in one or two places showing strange distortions, with
actual bends, continuing in curves not unlike the letter S. In the dry
river bed there were large rocks cut into the shape of tables on a single
pillar stand, but these were, of course, made by the erosion of water,
and at a subsequent date.
Further on we found a tiny stream of salt water in the picturesque
gorge--as weird and puzzling a bit of scenery as can be found in Persia,
if one carefully examined each hill, each rock, and tried to speculate on
their formation.
From the rocks--a hundred feet or so above the salt stream,--we came to a
spring--if one could call it by that name--of delicious sweet water. The
water dripped at the rate of about a tumbler-full an hour, but a gallon
or two had collected in a pool directly under the rock, with a refreshing
border of green grass round it. We gladly and carefully transferred the
liquid into one of the skins by means of a cup judiciously handled so as
not to take up the deep sediment of mud in the shallow pool.
We came across a very large caravan from Quetta in charge of some Beluch
drivers, and--after one's experience of how things are packed by Persian
caravans--one was greatly struck by the neat wooden packing boxes, duly
marked and numbered. I inquired whose caravan it was, and the Beluch said
it belonged to two English Sahibs who were ten miles behind, and were
expected to catch it up during the night. The names of the two sahibs
were so mispronounced by the Beluch that I could not, to save my life,
understand what they were.
We halted in the gorge at four o'clock, having come only sixteen miles
from my last camp. Altitude, 4,440 feet.