abae, near Pasar-gadae, also the site of a palace; Uxia, or the
Uxian city, which may have occupied the position of Mai-Amir, Obroatis,
Tragonice, Ardea, Portospana, Hyrba, etc., which it is impossible to
locate unless by the merest conjecture.

The chief districts into which the territory was divided were
Paraetacene, a portion of the Bakhtiyari mountain-chain, which some,
however, reckoned to Media; Mardyene, or the country of the Mardi, also
one of the hill tracts; Taocene, the district about Taoce, part of the
low sandy coast region; Ciribo, the more northern portion of the same
region; and Carmania, the entire eastern territory. These districts were
not divided from one another by any marked natural features, the only
division of the country to which such a character attached being the
triple one into the high sandy plains north of the mountains, the
mountain region, and the Deshtistan, or low hot tract along the coast.

From this account it will be easy to understand how Persia Proper
acquired and maintained the character of "a scant land and a rugged,"
which we find attaching to it in ancient authors. The entire area, as
has been already observed was about 100,000 square miles--little more
than half that of Spain, and about one fifth of the area of modern
Persia. Even of this space nearly one half was uninhabitable, consisting
either of barren stony mountain or of scorching sandy plain, ill
supplied with water, and often impregnated with salt, the habitable
portion consisted of the valleys and plains among the mountains and
along their skirts, together with certain favored spots upon the banks
of streams in the flat regions. These flat regions themselves were
traversed in many places by rocky ridges of a singularly forbidding
aspect. The whole appearance of the country was dry, stony, sterile. As
a modern writer observes, "the livery of the land is constantly brown
or gray; water is scanty; plains and mountains are equally destitute of
wood. When the traveller, after toiling over the rocky mountains that
separate the plains looks down from the pass he has won with toil
and difficulty upon the country below, his eye wanders unchecked and
unrested over an uniform brown expanse losing itself in distance."

Still this character, though predominant, is not universal. Wherever
there is water, vegetation springs up. The whole of the mountain region
is intersected by valleys and plains which are more or less fertile.
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