rags in the dust. A bullet has
entered his forehead, but the blood is staunched by the dust of the
road. His foot slips out of the stirrup, and the "Riding King" lies dead
as a stone outside Bam.

Another robber is severely wounded and is cut to pieces by the townsmen.
Bam has waked up. The entangled dromedaries with their burdens of slaves
and goods are captured, but the rest of the party, twelve riders with
ten baggage camels, have vanished in the darkness, pursued by some
infuriated dogs. Sixteen of the inhabitants of the town are missing. The
whole thing has taken place in half an hour. Bam sleeps no more this
night.

Now the dromedaries are urged on to the uttermost; they have double
loads to carry, but they travel as quickly as they came. The kidnapped
children cease to cry, and fall asleep with weariness and the violent
swaying motion. The party rides all night and all the next day without
stopping, and the robbers often look round to see if they are pursued.
They rest for the first time at the salt spring, posting a look-out on
an adjacent mound. They eat and drink without losing a minute, and get
ready for the rest of the ride. The captives are paralysed with fright;
the young women are half choked with weeping, and a little lad in a
tattered shirt goes about crying vainly for his mother. The eyes of the
captives are blindfolded with white bandages that they may not notice
the way they are travelling and try later to escape back to Bam. Then
the headlong ride is resumed, and after eight days the troop of riders
is back at home with their booty, but without their chief.

Innumerable raids of this kind have scourged eastern Persia, and in the
same way Turkomans have devastated Khorasan in the north-east. On the
eastern frontier it is the Kurds who are the robbers. In this disturbed
frontier region there is not a town without its small primitive mud fort
or outlook tower.

SCORPIONS

On running dromedaries we now ride on eastwards through northern
Baluchistan. Dry, burnt-up desert tracts, scantily clothed with
thistles and shrubs, moving dunes of fine yellow sand, low hill ridges
disintegrated by alternate heat and cold--such is the country where a
few nomads wander about with their flocks, and the stranger often
wonders how the animals find a living. In certain valleys, however,
there is pasture and also water, and sometimes belts of thriving
tamarisks are passed, and bushes of saxaul with green leafy bra