OF THE WEARISOME AND DESERT ROAD THAT HAS NOW TO BE
TRAVELLED.
On departing from the city of Kerman you find the road for seven days
most wearisome; and I will tell you how this is.{1} The first three
days you meet with no water, or next to none. And what little you do
meet with is bitter green stuff, so salt that no one can drink it; and
in fact if you drink a drop of it, it will set you purging ten times
at least by the way. It is the same with the salt which is made from
those streams; no one dares to make use of it, because of the excessive
purging which it occasions. Hence it is necessary to carry water for
the people to last these three days; as for the cattle, they must needs
drink of the bad water I have mentioned, as there is no help for it,
and their great thirst makes them do so. But it scours them to such
a degree that sometimes they die of it. In all those three days you
meet with no human habitation; it is all desert, and the extremity of
drought. Even of wild beasts there are none, for there is nothing for
them to eat.{2}
After those three days of desert [you arrive at a stream of fresh water
running underground, but along which there are holes broken in here and
there, perhaps undermined by the stream, at which you can get sight of
it. It has an abundant supply, and travellers, worn with the hardships
of the desert, here rest and refresh themselves and their beasts.]{3}
You then enter another desert which extends for four days; it is very
much like the former except that you do see some wild asses. And at the
termination of these four days of desert the kingdom of Kerman comes to
an end, and you find another city which is called Cobinan.
NOTE 1. [“The present road from Kermán to Kúbenán is to Zerend
about 50 miles, to the Sár i Benán 15 miles, thence to Kúbenán 30
miles—total 95 miles. Marco Polo cannot have taken the direct road
to Kúbenán, as it took him seven days to reach it. As he speaks of
waterless deserts, he probably took a circuitous route to the east
of the mountains, _viâ_ Kúhpáyeh and the desert lying to the north
of Khabis.” (_Houtum-Schindler_, _l.c._ pp. 496–497.) (Cf. _Major
Sykes_, ch. xxiii.)—H. C.]
NOTE 2.—This description of the Desert of Kermán, says Mr.
Khanikoff, “is very correct. As the only place in the Desert of Lút
where water is found is the dirty, salt, bitter, and green water
of the rivulet called _Shor-Rúd_ (the Salt River), we can have no
doubt of the direction of Marco Polo’s route from Kermán so far.”
Nevertheless I do not agree with Khanikoff that the route lay N.E.
in the direction of Ambar and Kain, for a reason which will appear
under the next chapter. I imagine the route to have been nearly
due north from Kermán, in the direction of Tabbas or of Tún. And
even such a route would, according to Khanikoff’s own map, pass the
Shor-Rúd, though at a higher point.
I extract a few lines from that gentleman’s narrative: “In
proportion as we got deeper into the desert, the soil became more
and more arid; at daybreak I could still discover a few withered
plants of _Caligonum_ and _Salsola_, and not far from the same spot
I saw a lark and another bird of a whitish colour, the last living
things that we beheld in this dismal solitude.... The desert had
now completely assumed the character of a land accursed, as the
natives call it. Not the smallest blade of grass, no indication of
animal life vivified the prospect; no sound but such as came from
our own caravan broke the dreary silence of the void.” (_Mém._ p.
176.)
[Major P. Molesworth Sykes (_Geog. Jour._ X. p. 578) writes: “At
Tun, I was on the northern edge of the great Dash-i-Lut (Naked
Desert), which lay between us and Kerman, and which had not been
traversed, in this particular portion, since the illustrious Marco
Polo crossed it, in the opposite direction, when travelling from
Kerman to ‘Tonocain’ _viâ_ Cobinan.” Major Sykes (_Persia_, ch.
iii.) seems to prove that geographers have, without sufficient
grounds, divided the great desert of Persia into two regions, that
to the north being termed Dasht-i-Kavir, and that further south
the Dasht-i-Lut—and that Lut is the one name for the whole desert,
Dash-i-Lut being almost a redundancy, and that _Kavir_ (the Arabic
_Kafr_) is applied to every saline swamp. “This great desert
stretches from a few miles out of Tehrán practically to the British
frontier, a distance of about 700 miles.”—H. C.]
NOTE 3.—I can have no doubt of the genuineness of this passage
from Ramusio. Indeed some such passage is necessary; otherwise why
distinguish between three days of desert and four days more of
desert? The underground stream was probably a subterraneous canal
(called _Kanát_ or _Kárez_), such as is common in Persia; often
conducted from a great distance. Here it may have been a relic of
abandoned cultivation. Khanikoff, on the road between Kermán and
Yezd, not far west of that which I suppose Marco to be travelling,
says: “At the fifteen inhabited spots marked upon the map, they
have water which has been brought from a great distance, and at
considerable cost, by means of subterranean galleries, to which
you descend by large and deep wells. Although the water flows at
some depth, its course is tracked upon the surface by a line of
more abundant vegetation.” (_Ib._ p. 200.) Elphinstone says he has
heard of such subterranean conduits 36 miles in length. (I. 398.)
Polybius speaks of them: “There is no sign of water on the surface;
but there are many underground channels, and these supply tanks in
the desert, that are known only to the initiated.... At the time
when the Persians got the upper hand in Asia, they used to concede
to such persons as brought spring-water to places previously
destitute of irrigation, the usufruct for five generations. And
Taurus being rife with springs, they incurred all the expense and
trouble that was needed to form these underground channels to great
distances, insomuch that in these days even the people who make use
of the water don’t know where the channels begin, or whence the
water comes.” (X. 28.)