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Iran - 2002
Iran - 2002
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-25 13:14:43
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while here and there upon its surface, pools of water, showing up in the most intense blue, were visible. Away to the north of it stood a distant range of low red hills. A peculiar haze, perhaps caused by evaporation, hangs over the whole scene, which, thou-ii softening the features of the distant hills, does not obliterate their details. This is the Great Salt Swamp, which, lying at a low level in the ceiitre of the great desert, receives into its bed the drainage from an immense tract of territory. All the rivers flowing into it are more-or-less salt and carry down to it annually a great volume of water. The fierce heat of the desert during the summer months causes a rapid evaporation, the result being that the salt constantly increases in proportion to the water, until at last the ground becomes caked with it.'
In the past year (1891), yet another section of the Great Kavir, and itself a new phenomenon, has been for the first time brought to light by the same officer, travelling in company with Mr. C. E. Biddulph. This is no less than a great expanse of solid rock salt, the deposit for countless centuries of numerous salt streams, called by the natives Daria-i-Nemek, or Sea of Salt. It has apparently been traversed for long years by native caravans, crossing from the Meshed-Teheran road to Kashan, from which its southern border is distant less than 40 miles to the north-east; but during all this period no hint of its existence has reached European ears. The two English travellers suddenly came upon it, having climbed a crest of the Siah Kull, a prominent ridge that rises from the heart of the desert. This is what they saw:-
'At our feet lay what looked like a frozen sea, but was in reality a deposit of salt, which entirely filled the hollow in the plains towards the south, and stretched away as far as the eye could reach on either side, glittering in the sun like a sheet of glass.'
Descending to the brink they marched across
...
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