s of water, crossed a tiny
anonymous village of six domed huts, and then came to a very large one
rejoicing in the name of Dadi. My fast camels carrying loads had gone
ahead, and we, who had started later on horses, caught them up some
sixteen miles onward, where there was a third little village, the
inhabitants of which were wild-looking and unkempt. The women and
children stampeded at our approach. The houses were flat-topped and were
no taller than seven feet, except the house of the head village man which
was two-storeyed and had a domed roof.

When the Hamun Halmund extended as far south as Kandak the Kuh-i-Kwajah
mountain was an island, but now the whole country around it is dry except
some small swamps and pools, on the edges of which thousands of sheep
could be seen grazing. It took a very powerful sight indeed to see what
the animals were grazing on. One's idea of a pasture--we always picture a
pasture for sheep as green--was certainly not fulfilled, and after a
minute inspection one saw the poor brutes feeding on tiny stumps of dried
grass, yellowish in colour and hardly distinguishable from the sand on
which it grew in clusters not more than half an inch high.

Where the Hamun had been its bed was now of a whitish colour from salt
deposits.

The Kuh-i-Kwajah (mountain), occasionally also called Kuh-i-Rustam,
rising as it does directly from the flat, is most attractive and
interesting, more particularly because of its elongated shape and its
flat top, which gives it quite a unique appearance. Seen from the east,
it stretches for about three miles and a half or even four at its base,
is 900 feet high, and about three miles on top of the plateau. The
summit, even when the beholder is only half a mile away from it, appears
like a flat straight line against the sky-line, a great boulder that
stands up higher on the south-west being the only interruption to this
uniformity. The black rocky sides of the mountain are very
precipitous--in fact, almost perpendicular at the upper portion, but the
lower part has accumulations of clay, mud and sand extending in a gentle
slope. In fact, roughly speaking, the silhouette of the mountain has the
appearance of the section of an inverted soup-plate.

[Illustration: silhouette of kuh-i-kwajah.]

Major Sykes, in the _Royal Geographical Society's Journal_, describes
this mountain as resembling in shape "an apple," but surely if there ever
was anything in the world that had no