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Iran - 2002

Iran - 2002

Jacek Pałkiewicz
2006-06-25 13:14:43

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too ingenious critics have fancifully endeavoured to connect with the Lot of Holy Writ, but which is apparently a local synonym for a wilderness, is situated at a much lower level than the Dasht-i-Kavir; for its normal elevation is less than 2,000 feet, and in places it sinks to only 500 feet above the sea level. Upon the maps it occupies a staring and eloquent blank. Few travellers have crossed it, fewer still having done so would voluntarily repeat the experiment. Marco Polo was here, but where was not the invincible Venetian ? In the succeeding century Friar Odoricus thus described its charms, calling it the Sea of Sand:
- 'Now that sea is a wondrous thing and right perilous. And there were none of us who desired to enter on that sea. For it, is all of dry sand, without any moisture, and it shifteth, as the sea doth when in storm, now hither, now thither; and as it shifteth it maketh waves in like manner as the sea doth ; so that countless people travelling thereon have been overwhelmed and drowned, and buried in those sands. For when blown about and buffeted by the winds, they are raised into hills, now in this place, now in that, according as the wind chanceth to blow.'

Khanikoff crossed the Dasht-i-Lut from Neh to Kerman in 1859. Goldsmid's party were on its borders in 1871. Colonel Stewart made an expedition into it in 1882. Lieutenant Galindo twice crossed it, once in six days, and once in five days, in 1887 and 1888, traversing a belt of 120 miles entirely without water. His description is almost identical with that of the worthy Minorite friar 550 years earlier. He could not fail to notice the extraordinary resemblance presented by the blown sand to the waves of a chopping sea. These sand billows alternate with bare expanses of black gravel, and with a phenomenon not previously described. This is a region of curious square-cut clay bluffs, believed by the natives to be the ruins of an ancient city, and called by them the Shehr-i-Lut, but consisting in reality of 'natural formations of hard clay, cut and carved by the fierce north-west wind into strange shapes, suggestive of walls and towers.' Lieutenant Galindo found everywhere beneath the sand a substratum of hard rock-salt some eight or nine inches below the surface, thus proving the saline character of the desert, and here and there patches of genuine kavir, the ground being mapped out in irregular polygons with dividing walls of solid salt, or studded with hard round white bubbles of the same material, like a lot of half-buried ostrich eggs, or covered with a sort of moss of delicate looking salt spiculae, standing up like needles an inch long, but strong as steel spikes. The worst part of this desert is its southeast corner between Neh and Bani, which is one of the most awful regions on the face of the earth. Here the prevailing north-west winds have swept the sand together, and banked it up in huge mounds and hills, ever shifting and eddying. A fierce sun beats down upon the surface which is as fiery hot as incandescent metal and almost always the bad-i-sam or simoom is blowing, 'so desiccated by its passage over hundreds of miles of burning desert, that if it overtakes man or animal its parched breath in a moment sucks every atom of moisture from his frame, and leaves him a withered and blackened mummy.'