alternation of mountain, plain,
and narrow valley, curiously intermixed, and hitherto mapped very
imperfectly. In places this district answers fully to the description
of Nearchus, being, "richly fertile, picturesque, and romantic almost
beyond imagination, with lovely wooded dells, green mountain sides, and
broad plains, suited for the production of almost any crops." But it is
only to the smaller moiety of the region that such a character attaches;
more than half the mountain tract is sterile and barren; the supply of
water is almost everywhere scanty; the rivers are few, and have not much
volume; many of them, after short courses, end in the sand, or in small
salt lakes, from which the superfluous water is evaporated. Much of the
country is absolutely without streams, and would be uninhabitable were
it not for the _kanats_ or _kareezes_--subterranean channels made by art
for the conveyance of spring water to be used in irrigation. The
most desolate portion of the mountain tract is towards the north and
north-east, where it adjoins upon the third region, which is the worst
of the three. This is a portion of the high tableland of Iran, the great
desert which stretches from the eastern skirts of Zagros to the Hamoon,
the Helmend, and the river of Subzawur. It is a dry and hard plain,
intersected at intervals by ranges of rocky hills, with a climate
extremely hot in summer and extremely cold in winter, incapable of
cultivation, excepting so far as water can be conveyed by _kanats_,
which is, of course, only a short distance. The fox, the jackal, the
antelope, and the wild ass possess this sterile and desolate tract,
where "all is dry and cheerless," and verdure is almost unknown.

Perhaps the two most peculiar districts of. Persia are the lake basins
of Neyriz and Deriah-i-Nemek. The rivers given off from the northern
side of the great mountain chain between the twenty-ninth and
thirty-first parallels, being unable to penetrate the mountains, flow
eastward towards the desert; and their waters gradually collect into two
streams, which end in two lakes, the Deriah-i-Nemek and that of Neyriz,
or Lake Bakhtigan. The basin of Lake Neyriz lies towards the north. Here
the famous Bendamir, and the Pulwar or Kur-ab, flowing respectively from
the north-east and the north, unite in one near the ruins of the ancient
Persepolis, and, after fertilizing the plain of Merdasht, run eastward
down a rich vale for a distance of some forty mi