w a lark and another bird of
a whitish colour, the last living things that we beheld in this dismal
solitude.... The desert had now completely assumed the character of a land
accursed, as the natives call it. Not the smallest blade of grass, no
indication of animal life vivified the prospect; no sound but such as came
from our own caravan broke the dreary silence of the void." (_Mem._ p.
176.)

[Major P. Molesworth Sykes (_Geog. Jour._ X. p. 578) writes: "At Tun, I
was on the northern edge of the great Dash-i-Lut (Naked Desert), which lay
between us and Kerman, and which had not been traversed, in this
particular portion, since the illustrious Marco Polo crossed it, in the
opposite direction, when travelling from Kerman to 'Tonocain' via
Cobinan." Major Sykes (_Persia_, ch. iii.) seems to prove that geographers
have, without sufficient grounds, divided the great desert of Persia into
two regions, that to the north being termed Dasht-i-Kavir, and that
further south the Dasht-i-Lut--and that Lut is the one name for the whole
desert, Dash-i-Lut being almost a redundancy, and that _Kavir_ (the arabic
_Kafr_) is applied to every saline swamp. "This great desert stretches
from a few miles out of Tehran practically to the British frontier, a
distance of about 700 miles."--H. C.]

NOTE 3.--I can have no doubt of the genuineness of this passage from
Ramusio. Indeed some such passage is necessary; otherwise why distinguish
between three days of desert and four days more of desert? The underground
stream was probably a subterraneous canal (called _Kanat_ or _Karez_),
such as is common in Persia; often conducted from a great distance. Here
it may have been a relic of abandoned cultivation. Khanikoff, on the road
between Kerman and Yezd, not far west of that which I suppose Marco to be
travelling, says: "At the fifteen inhabited spots marked upon the map,
they have water which has been brought from a great distance, and at
considerable cost, by means of subterranean galleries, to which you
descend by large and deep wells. Although the water flows at some depth,
its course is tracked upon the surface by a line of more abundant
vegetation." (Ib. p. 200.) Elphinstone says he has heard of such
subterranean conduits 36 miles in length. (I. 398.) Polybius speaks of
them: "There is no sign of water on the surface; but there are many
underground channels, and these supply tanks in the desert, that are known
only to the initiated.... At the