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Iran - 2002
Iran - 2002
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-25 13:14:43
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guide the mariners who navigated its waves. Sir F. Goldsmid mentions, as confirmatory evidence, that upon the other or eastern edge of the kavir he found a village named Yunsi, from a fixed tradition that Yunas, i.e. Jonah, was there cast up by the whale - a fiction which could hardly have been localised upon dry land. Guides and superstitious villagers, living near the various kavirs, tell marvellous tales of the circumstances under which they ceased to be seas and were dried up; but these are interesting only to students of folklore, and need not be here repeated.
In different parts, the kavir presents a different aspect, according to the nature of the soil and the amount of salt water that refuses to be drained. Sometimes it is quite dry and soft, with a thin glazed crust on the top, which kavir crackles beneath the horse's hoof, and with powdery soil beneath. Sometimes it presents an expanse of hard baked clay. Again it will take the form of mobile hillocks and dangerous quicksands. When the water is lying upon the surface, particularly in winter, it will in one place resemble a great lake, in another it will be a slimy swamp; while after the evaporation of the early summer suns the saline incrustation on the dried up patches will glitter in the distance like sheets of ice.
Of travellers who have crossed or skirted the Great Kavir there are few. Marco Polo has been said to have traversed a portion of it on his supposed route from Tabbas to Damghan about 1272 ; although it is more probable that he marched further to the east, and crossed the northern portion of the Dasht-i-Lut. Dr. Buhse, a Russian, crossed a portion of on a journey from Yezd to Damghan in 1849, and was said by Sir 0. St. John to have been the sole European who had done So. Sir F. Goldsmid and the Seistan Boundary Commission were near to its eastern fringe in 1872. Sir C. MacGregor, on his march from Yezd to Tabbas, via Khur, in 1875, was upon its southern border. Finally,
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