Overland to India, Volume 2 – Sven Hedin
A detailed account of the journey from Trebizond to Quetta. The route took Hedin through Erzerum, skirted Mount Ararat to Etchmiadzin and Nakichevan (the grave of Noah), and thence by Tabriz and Kasvin to Teheran, where the first part of his journey ended. The second part took him to Nasratabad in Seistan; the third to Quetta, where he may be said to have reached India . . . . The two volumes in which it is recorded contain a vast deal more than is above indicated. There are many digressions (from the bare record of travel) , some of which will not appeal to the general reader, whose interest is chiefly confined to the tale of travel, but many of them will command the attention of geographers and experts . . . . To mention a few, there are notes about Marco Polo’s travels, about the Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Nineveh, chapters on travels in the Kavír, on the march of Alexander the Great, on post-glacial climatic changes in Persia, on the distribution of desert and on the plague. This is volume two out of two.
Overland to India, Volume 2.x
Format: eBook
Overland to India, Volume 2.
ISBN: 9783849663391 (eBook)
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CHAPTER XXXV. ON THE BORDER BETWEEN THE SANDY DESERT AND THE KEVIR
Just as we were setting out on February 19 a small caravan arrived from Khur on its way to Cha-meji. Its leader warned us most emphatically not to cross the great Kevir bay, which would certainly be under water in some parts, and where in any case we should quite ruin our camels. Ah, well, we thought, we shall see when we come nearer, and we marched on in good but cold weather (38.8° at seven o’clock) and under a sky streaked and mottled by small white clouds in quite the same regular arrangement as the small ridges and lines in the sand of a shallow lake. Small dwindling rain-furrows ran towards the east-northeast, and on the right, we left a small longish pool formed by rainwater. Beyond the eastern point of the range of hills on our right now appeared another higher range with snow on its crest, called Kuh-i-pusht-i-badam, while to the southeast the country was quite flat and open, and to the east-southeast was seen a hill called Kuh-i-rabat-i-khan.
Our march brought us to a bay, 300 yards broad, of the isolated kevir which surrounded the small pool. It would have taken us only a few minutes longer to go round this little bay, but Habibullah, who walked in front, marched fearlessly forward and the caravan followed. But the farther we proceeded from the shore the softer the ground became. The camels tramped down quite a trench of mud and slime and soon sank in up to their knees. And they sank still deeper at every step. A camel fell in the first detachment, but got up again without help. Then the next in the row, the large dark stallion, which was carrying four sacks of straw weighing 100 batman, came down. But he fought bravely and composedly with the treacherous mud, was urged on with cries and blows, and splashed and tramped on with long active steps, till all at once he sank in to the belly, and lay as though stuck fast in a mould.
General commotion! All hands hurry up. The camel’s load must be taken off and carried ashore by the men, and then by the united strength of the men and not less by his own intelligence and energy the animal is raised from the horrible mud-bath, which might have cost him his life. He is then led quietly and steadily by a roundabout way to firm land with the mire hanging and dropping from his belly and legs. He is summarily scraped clean and loaded again, while the other camels are brought along a surer path over this treacherous ground. Not once in the great Kevir had we passed such a slough as this, but I had another illustration of the peculiarities of the kind of ground Persians call kevir. The small arm we are now crossing has been softened and disturbed by the recent heavy rain and has also a large admixture of sand. After a week of sunny weather the surface would become hard and unyielding, forming a tough crust over the slough. Under such conditions as these, it is easy to understand that a caravan which goes out into the Kevir in good weather and is caught in heavy rain in the middle of it, is exposed to the greatest danger. In ground such as we have just tested, even the strongest camel, though relieved of its load, is sucked under in a few hundred yards.
We had at any rate learned a useful lesson and saw that we must travel round the large Kevir bay, from which we were now separated only by a sandspit. It was better to keep to dry ground rather than run such great risks to save a trifle of 6 farsakh.
We cross in a south-easterly direction the spit of firm ground, which is covered with coarse sand and small dunes with or without saxaul and shrubs and come to the western edge of the great Kevir bay, and see the outlines of the hills standing on its eastern side in light but distinct tones. The bay lies between like a great fiord, and a hasty glance over it is sufficient to convince us that it is absolutely impassable. As usual, various belts of different colours are distinguishable. The yellow are half dry, the white are covered with a sheet of salt, while the dark brown, almost black, are sodden and would not bear the weight of a camel; but worst of all are the blue areas, which simply indicate shallow rain-water still remaining on the surface; they lie at a distance of 2 to 2 ½ miles from the firm shore.
A singular and unusual as well as a slow and wearisome country awaits us during the rest of our day’s march. We go towards the south-east. On the left stretches the Kevir, to the right a belt of more or less compact blown sand. The limit between the two is so sharp that it can usually be determined within a span. And this boundary does not run in a straight or slightly curved line, but is, on the contrary, as jagged as a saw, while an unbroken succession of dune spurs open out before us separated from one another by equally sharp kevir creeks. The sandspits are fairly flat and spoon-shaped, and their extremities pointing north or north-north-east are rounded off. The dunes are often held together by saxaul and shrubs, and their windward and leeward sides cannot be distinguished. Sometimes there are steps on their flanks, and in the Kevir creeks are seen concentric zones of different shades, probably lines of unequal desiccation. The rounded sand-dunes contrast sharply with the level dark brown Kevir.
It is evident that such a formation of the ground must be very difficult for travelling. If we try to cross a deeply indented Kevir creek, the first camel sinks in the mud and draws back hastily, and we have to go round. The line of march, therefore, becomes an undulating line in a horizontal plane. And if we cross the sandspits it becomes an undulating line in a vertical plane. Actually, it is a combination of the two. There is in general no road or path, partly because here travelers march where they like and partly because the tracks are swept away by the wind.
The hills in the south-west, Kuh-i-khonche-datkin, Kuh-i-surkh, and Kuh-i-irech, merge more and more together, and now look like a single continuous elevation with a little snow. But in front of us there is no change in the landscape, the sharp jagged coastline runs on south-eastwards, while the sand, however, becomes ever higher and more barren. The dunes are now 100 feet high, and sometimes we can go for ten minutes along the top of a sandhill as on the bottom of an upturned punt. A small detached bit of kevir, surrounded on all sides by high dunes, is left on the right. Another is larger, and some isolated sand-hills stand up in it like islands in the middle of a lake. Three more such kevir flats without sand are passed. It seems as if the sand were heaped up on a substratum of kevir, which, if such is the case, must be firmer than elsewhere to be able to bear the burden. Possibly the sand covering protects the material of the kevir from atmospheric moisture and promotes desiccation to a greater depth. The small detached hollows of kevir have formerly formed parts of the great Kevir bay, but the sand has encroached and they have finally been enclosed in it.
The last detached kevir flat we pass is drawn out from WSW, to ENE,, and on its flat surface stand two cairns marking the route between Yezd and Tebbes, the last stage being Mehrijan. Five such nishan or waymarks have been erected by Parsis from Yezd within the sandy belt, to guide travelers in foggy weather. No other sign of a road is visible. After rain men have to travel through the sand, but at other times they try to make use, as far as possible, of the flat kevir flats, which here play the same part as the bayirs in the desert between Cherchen and Tatran in Eastern Turkestan,
The sand is of two shades, a lighter and a darker yellow. The latter is wet, the former, which lies chiefly on more exposed convex surfaces, is dry. When the wind sweeps over them, the dry light sand may be seen spreading itself over the dark. The dunes now become lower and are clothed with vegetation. We try to cross a kevir creek. It bears, and also the next, and for the rest of the day’s march we can keep outside the sandspits. It proves that the Kevir at this part consists to a large extent of sand, and therefore as long as it remains dry bears better than elsewhere, affording us an excellent path where we are no longer obliged to go in and out. Here the same struggle goes on between the Kevir and the drift sand as between drift sand and water in Eastern Turkestan; but it is the sand which gains ground, and the level surface of the Kevir which is contracted and grows less. If we compare the conditions in the Kevir with the Takla-makan we shall involuntarily come to the conclusion that in both cases the same effective work of transmutation is in progress, caused by weathering in association with changes of climate and the transporting action of wind. But in the two lands the transformation of the earth’s surface is at different stages. In Eastern Turkestan the blown sand has spread and piled itself up in huge quantities, so that only an insignificant and vanishing part of the ground is bare. In Persia the bottom, that is, the ground of the Kevir, is still incomparably more extensive than the sand-belts on its margin. If the change of climate continues in the same direction as now, that is to say, towards a higher degree of drought, it may be taken for granted that the slough of the Kevir will lose moisture and afflux of water, and in time will become firmer, and I that the drift sand will with greater ease extend and firmly establish itself Undoubtedly the physical geographical changes now in progress will end in entirely converting the Kevir into a sandy desert of the same kind as in Eastern Turkestan. And we can, on the other hand, draw the inference that Eastern Turkestan, after having been at one time a part of the Central Asiatic Mediterranean sea, was gradually filled up with finely disintegrated products of weathering of the same kind as in the present Kevir, and that its solidified lake of wet mud and clay was finally dried and hardened to such a degree that it could bear the weight of the encroaching sand. And that the sand was formerly of less extent than now is proved by the archaeological discoveries of myself and other travelers. The substratum laid bare in the bayirs of the Cherchen desert strongly reminds one of the ground of the Kevir. In both cases it is dark, fine matter, forming an almost plane surface. In both cases this material, when mixed with water, is transformed into a slough in which a man sinks beyond recovery; but in Eastern Turkestan the ground -water stands at a greater depth, and as rain is there exceedingly rare one can go with impunity anywhere over the level bayir ground.
I by no means regretted the long detour round the southern edge of the great Kevir bay, for by this means we learned all the details of the coast-line; every sandspit was inserted on my map, and for a long time to come any traveler who takes the trouble to follow the same shore, will be able, by a comparison with my map, to draw correct conclusions and determine in which direction and to what amount the sand-belt is extending.
Farther south the Kevir creeks penetrate less deeply between the sandspits, and before these He small exposed sheets of water. At length we leave the sandy coast at a still greater distance, and make straight for a promontory in the south-east. But suddenly an unexpected change presents itself, for before us lies an extensive sheet of water. The caravan leader takes off his boots and convinces himself that the ground beneath the water will easily bear — it consists of close sand; and then the camels splash cheerfully into water a foot deep. Regular waves lap round the ships of the desert, and the caravan presents a strange and picturesque spectacle as it marches right across the shallow lake.
That the usual way really passed through the water was shown plainly when we met in its midst a caravan of twenty-five camels, which was returning from Turshiz to Khur and Germe with a load of wheat. One of the men in this caravan told us, as he passed, that he and his comrades had been attacked at the last camping-ground, that is, the previous evening, by four armed robbers, who were carrying stolen goods on a camel. Whether these disturbers of the peace held the men of the caravan in respect because they had a gun to defend themselves with, or whether they were influenced by philanthropic feelings, at any rate, they confined their plundering to the caravan’s reserve of powder and ball and demanded nothing else. This story made a deep impression on my men, and all the evening they talked of nothing but tales of robbers.
The point we were steering for turned out to be too far off, and when the leader thought that we had gone far enough after 8 1/2 hours’ march, he changed his direction and turned in towards the shore, crossing a belt of slippery mud. We set up our tents at the foot of a dune, quite 130 feet high, where saxaul as tall as trees grew. The locality is called Chemgert. The height was 2539 feet.
The first thing I do is to go up the dune, from the top of which I can command the whole horizon. I have an expert with me who tells me the names of all the hills in sight and points out in which direction the various roads run. Then I descend to inspect the camels, who haughtily and indifferently sniff at the chopped straw before it is mixed with cottonseed, but afterwards eat it with the keener appetite. I make sure that the dogs and fowls get their meal — we have bought a cock and some hens in Khur, which run about picking and cackling between the tents, and give the camp a homely and rural air. I stand a while at the men’s fire where two wanderers with an ass from Khur are entertained. Like ourselves, they are on the way to Tebbes, and they ask if they may be allowed to accompany us. as they are so afraid of robbers. Certainly, with pleasure. The Cossacks sit and clean their rifles and keep their ammunition handy and propose that a night watch should be kept at the camp. For my part, I have no belief in robbers. Twenty years ago I travelled backwards and forwards all through Persia without a single retainer, and was never molested.
The morning of February 20 promised nothing good, and before noon its promise was fulfilled. When I went out before seven o’clock the sky was covered with a dense uniform mass of clouds, and there was a fine drizzle. The minimum thermometer marked 37°; at seven o’clock the temperature was 42.4°, at one o’clock 43°, and at nine o’clock 37.8°. While I was walking briskly on foot in advance the rain increased, and at nine a.m. it was so thick that I mounted my tall camel, took my ulster, and wrapped a couple of rugs round me. It felt quite cool in the searching northerly blast, which increased as the day advanced.
As yesterday, we follow the coast on hard, excellent sandy ground and pass again a succession of spits. At a point where the road forks we halt for a consultation. A distinct path runs east-north-east right across the Kevir, cutting off the southernmost part of the large bay. The other path continues along the sandspits towards the southeast. One of our guides believes that the direct road will bear and will save us at least a farsakh, and Gulam Hussein says that it will save us a good hour. But as the caravan we met yesterday had closely followed the coast, I consider it more advisable to take the longer way, whereby J also I shall be able to complete the map of the bay’s contour.
The ground of the Kevir now becomes lumpy and black, but it is so mixed with sand that it bears in all parts. A thin sheet of salt covers the south-eastern side of every hillock, and a little way out from the coast to the northwest the surface looks white, while to the south-east it is dark. It is as though hoar-frost or drifted snow were beginning to collect in the lee of the obstacles.
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