stan and Godare Hashimshan
Mountains--Chappar Khana inscriptions and ornamentations by
travellers--Shemsh.

The most characteristic objects in Yezd are the _badjirs_, a most
ingenious device for catching the wind and conveying it down into the
various rooms of dwelling. These _badjirs_ are on the same principle as
the ventilating cowls of ships. The ventilating shafts are usually very
high and quadrangular, with two, three, or more openings on each side at
the summit and corresponding channels to convey the wind down into the
room below. The lower apertures of the channels are blocked except on the
side where the wind happens to blow, and thus a draught is created from
the top downwards, sweeping the whole room and rendering it quite cool
and pleasant even in the hottest days of summer. The reason that one
finds so many of these high _badjirs_ in Yezd is probably that, owing to
constant accumulations of sand, the whole city is now below the level of
the surrounding desert, and some device had to be adopted to procure
fresh air inside the houses and protect the inhabitants from the
suffocating lack of ventilation during the stifling heat of the summer.
The _badjirs_ are certainly constructed in a most scientific or, rather,
practical manner, and answer the purpose to perfection.

When we leave Yezd the city itself cannot be seen at all, but just above
the sand of the desert rise hundreds of these quadrangular towers, some
very large indeed, which give the place a quaint appearance.

From Yezd to Kerman there is again a service of post-horses, so I availed
myself of it in order to save as much time as possible. The horses were
not much used on this road so they were excellent.

I departed from Yezd on October 26th, and soon after leaving the city and
riding through the usual plentiful but most unattractive ruins, we were
travelling over very uninteresting country, practically a desert. We
passed two villages--Najafabat and Rachmatabad--and then wound our way
through avenues of dried-up mulberry trees at Mahommedabad or Namadawat,
a village where silk-worms are reared in quantities, which accounts for
the extensive mulberry plantations to provide food for them. The village
is large and is three farsakhs from Yezd, or something like ten miles.

The "farsakh"--the most elastic measure ever invented--decreases here to
just above three miles, whereas further north it averaged four miles.

In a strong wind we r