nd their under-lips hang down like bags.

At the very last village on the edge of the desert we stay two days to
prepare ourselves for the dangers ahead of us. The headman of the
village owns ten camels, which he will gladly hire us for a few days;
they are to carry trusses of straw and water in leathern bags. Our own
camels are already fully laden, and the hired camels are only to give us
a start. When they turn back we shall have to shift for ourselves.

After we have left this village not a sign of life is visible. Before us
to the south-east small isolated hills stand up like islands in the sea,
and beyond them the horizon of the desert lies as level as that of the
ocean. Through this great sandy waste the caravans travel from oasis to
oasis, but in the north there is a tract, called the Kevir, within which
not the smallest oasis can be found. Not a clump of grass, not even a
blade, is to be seen, for the desert is saturated with salt, and when it
rains in winter the briny clay becomes as slippery as ice. And this is
precisely the place we are making for.

We travelled a whole month before we came to the point where we intended
to make the attempt to cross the Kevir. Hitherto everything had
continued in a steady course, and one day had been like another. It was
winter and we had fully 25 degrees of frost in the night: one day it
snowed so thickly that the foremost camels in the train were seen only
as faint shadows. For several days mist lay so dense over the desert
that we had to trust chiefly to the compass. Sometimes we travelled for
four or five days without finding a drop of water, but we had all we
needed in our leathern bags.

At the edge of the sandy desert, where high dunes are piled up by the
wind, tamarisks and saxauls were often growing. Both are steppe bushes
which grow to a height of several feet; their stems are hard and
provided us with excellent fuel. My servants gathered large faggots, and
the camp fires flamed up brightly and grandly, throwing a yellow light
over the silent waste.

From a village called Jandak I set out with only two men and four
camels, but we had to wait for four days on the edge of the salt desert
because of rain. When rain falls in the Kevir the whole desert soon
becomes a sea of slippery mud, and camels cannot walk without slipping
and falling. Whole caravans have perished in this cruel desert by being
overtaken by rain, and in many other cases the men only have managed t