lage of Deh Namek is reached about mid-day, where my
ever-varying bill of fare takes the shape of raw eggs and pomegranates.
Deh Namek is too small and unimportant a place to support a public
tchai-khan; but along the Meshed pilgrim road the villagers are keenly
alive to the chance of earning a stray keran, and the advent of one of
those inexhaustible keran-mines, a "Sahib," is the signal for some
enterprising person, sufficiently well-to-do to own a samovar, to get up
steam in it and prepare tea.

East of Deh Namek, the wheeling continues splendid for a dozen miles,
traversing a level desert on which one finds no drinkable water for about
twenty miles. Across the last eight miles of the desert the road is
variable, consisting of alternate stretches of ridable and unridable
ground, the latter being generally unridable by reason of sand and loose
gravel, or thickly strewn flints. More antelopes are encountered east of
Deh Namek; at one place, particularly, I enjoy quite a little exciting
spurt in an effort to intercept a band that are heading across my road
from the Elburz foot-hills to the desert. The wheeling is here
magnificent, the spurt develops into a speed of fourteen miles an hour;
the antelopes see their danger, or, at all events, what they fancy to be
danger, and their apprehensions are not by any mean lessened by the new
and startling character of their pursuer. Wild antelopes are timid things
at all times, and, as may be readily imagined, the sight of a mysterious
glistening object, speeding along at a fourteen or fifteen mile pace to
intercept them, has a magical effect upon their astonishing powers of
locomotion. They seem to fly rather than run, and to skim like swallows
over the surface of the level plain rather than to touch the ground; but
they were some distance from the road when they first realized my
terrifying presence, and I am within fifty yards of the band when they
flash like a streak of winged terror across the road. These antelopes do
not cease their wild flight within the range of my powers of observation;
long after the mousy hue of their bodies has rendered their forms
indistinguishable in the distance from the sympathetic coloring of the
desert, rapidly bobbing specks of white betray the fact that their
supposed narrow escape from the vengeful pursuit of the bicycle has given
them a fright that will make them suspicious of the Meshed pilgrim road
for weeks.

"Deh Namek" means "salt villa