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Iran - 2002
Iran - 2002
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-25 13:14:43
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across it till they came to the actual sheet of salt. 'This at the edge was soft and sloppy like half-melted ice ; but, as we proceeded, it gained in consistency till at a distance of 3 or 4 miles it resembled nothing more than very solid ice, strong enough to bear any weight.'
The travellers tried to ascertain its depth ; but it was so hard that with iron tent-pegs they could only detach a few chips. The natives said it was several feet thick. Crossing this astonishing expanse by moonlight, in order to escape the blinding glare of the sun, they estimated its breadth as 25 miles, and its length as even greater. This sea of solid rock-salt is probably without a rival in the world.
Such, then, is the superficial aspect of the Dasht-i-Kavir. Traversed only with difficulty by routes lying higher than the general level, it may be said within the vast area of its limits absolutely to cut off northern from southern Persia, and to interpose a barrier between the two as grim and insurmountable as, at the opposite extreme of nature, do the mighty ramparts of the Himalaya between British India and Tibet. Should it ever be the fate of Persia to submit to territorial and political partition, nature has, in this part at any rate, saved the contracting or conflicting parties the expense and trouble of a Boundary Commission.
From the Dasht-i-Kavir, or Great Salt Desert, I turn to the Dasht-i-Lut, or Great Sand Desert, separating Khorasan in the south-east from Kerman, and occupying a sorrowful parallelogram between the towns of Neh and Tabbas on the north, and Kerman and Yezd on the south. Not that this sand desert is without salt. On the contrary salt is perhaps its chief ingredient ; but it is rarely kavir, i.e. it is rarely overlaid either with a saline incrustation or with a briny swamp; and it gives birth to a few miserable desert shrubs, which is a concession to respectability that no kavir has ever vouchsafed. The Lut, which some too
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