on the head with it,
which was meant as a blessing, and we gave him some silver pieces, which
he said he did not want for himself, but for the Ziarat. He wore chains
like a prisoner. He appeared to be in an advanced stage of idiocy and
_abrutissement_, caused by his lonely life in his 5 feet cubic stone
cabin among the desolate Malek-Siah mountains.

Having at this place rounded the most westerly point of the Afghan
frontier we turned due east on a tortuous but well defined track. At
this point began the actual British road, and being from this point
under British supervision it was well kept, and made extremely easy for
camel and horse traffic.

Three miles from the Ziarat the sand hills began to get smaller and
smaller to the west, but still remained high to the east. One was
particularly struck by the peculiar formation of the mountains. To the
west they formed a continuous rugged, irregularly topped chain, with
sharp pointed peaks, whereas to the east we had isolated, single domed
hills all well rounded and smooth.

Where the track turns sharply south-east we entered a vast basin with
picturesque high mountains to the south and north, and a series of single
well-rounded mounds in front of them, rising from one to two thousand
feet above the plain.

On nearing Robat one finds the scenery plainly illustrating the entire
evolution of a small sand hill into a high mountain. We have the tiny
mounds of sand, only a few inches high, clogged round tamarisk shrubs,
then further higher and higher mounds, until they spread out so far that
two, three, or more blend together, forming a low bank, and then banks
increase to high dunes 40 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet high. These grow higher
and higher still; the sand below is compressed by the weight above; water
exercises its petrifying influence from the base upward, and from the
centre outward, and more sand accumulates on the upper surface until they
become actual hill ranges of a compact shale-like formation in
horizontal strata, each stratum being slightly less hardened than the
underlying, and each showing plainly defined the actions of water and sun
to which they were exposed when uppermost. Then, above these hills,
further accumulations have formed, which solidifying in turn have in the
course of centuries become high mountains. They have, however, never lost
the characteristics of the little primary accumulation against the humble
tamarisk, to which they still bear, on a