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." (Mem.
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' via
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 Tehran 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 Kanat or Karez),
such as is common in Persia; often conducted from a great distance. Here
it may have been a relic of abandoned cultivation.
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