The Hidden Treasure

hills." At that time, he told me, there was more water, and
many of the streams marked on the map are now dry.

By this time our ponies had finished their breakfast of straw,
and we started, only pausing a minute when two beautiful
girls came running after us in long red gowns and velvet
coats and great turbans, and asked if I would mind stopping
a minute, to let them look at me.

To the Capital of Pusht-i-Kuh
The big basin of the Aftab is almost entirely filled with
tobacco plantations, and new hills, hitherto unseen, stood up
around it. But we left it immediately, and entered an untidy
country of glaring limestone, amid whose unimportant valleys
and ridges we spent the morning, circling towards the nordr
round the outworks of a table mountain called Shalam
These hills with cliff-like tops are a feature of the land, whid
looks as if it had once been flat to the height of their summits
and then gradually been eaten away into small untidy chao
by the action of water and the soft backboneless structure o
the hills. Kebir Kuh, alone, made of different and harder rock
looks as if Nature had intended it for a mountain from the first
On our left now as we turned gradually north, we had th<
hills of the Iraq border round Mandali, the same inhospitabl
belt as we had traversed lower down from Bedrah. In th
distance they looked pointed and wavelike; but the countr
ahead of us ran in long snouts level as moraines. The pad
was white, and so were the rocks around it: the oak tree
parched and stunted: the watercourses mere empty gullic
made for the transitory floods of rains: and not a flower abou
except the autumn crocus, that pushed anaemic, leafless blossorr
through die dust.
At eleven, we dismounted by a long-promised spring c
[166]