languages.

The number of travellers along the Nushki-Sistan route is gradually
increasing, several officers returning to England travelling by it; but I
was assured that I was the first European who had travelled on that route
in the opposite direction, viz, from England to Quetta.

Only British subjects and Persians, it is stated, are allowed to travel
on this route, and some quaint instances of inconceivable official
formality on the part of the Government of India are cited. For instance,
a German was allowed to travel by the route from Quetta to Sistan, but
another German who wished at the same time to travel from Sistan to
Quetta was arrested at the frontier, detained some two months in Sistan,
and permission refused.

I myself had quite an amusing experience at a certain station with a
travelling police officer, who was not aware of my coming, and seemed in
a great state of mind, fearing that I should prove to be a Russian spy!

[Illustration: The Nushki-Robat Track.]

The only thing to be regretted along this route, and one which I think
will be a perpetual cause of friction and annoyance with the Persians and
Russians--as I am sure it would be to us were we in their case--is that
we should allow pilgrims to use this trade route in order to visit the
sacred shrine of Imam Raza in Meshed. The number is so fast increasing
that it is proposed, I believe, to provide special accommodation for
pilgrims at every stage between Quetta and Robat.

Now, there are pilgrims and pilgrims. Some are no doubt well-to-do people
and deserve to be looked after; but the greater number are decrepit,
sickly fanatics, burdened with all sorts of ailments, whose wish it is to
go and die and be buried in the vicinity of the sacred shrine.
Furthermore, not only do the living ones go and breathe their last in
Meshed (or more frequently upon the road), but among their personal
luggage they try to bring over corpses of relations for interment in the
holy burial place. The passage of corpses to Persia through Beluchistan
is not permitted by the local government, but occasional attempts are
made to smuggle them through, and it is not a very easy matter to detect
them, not even by the smell of the corpses, which can be no worse than
that of the living pilgrims. Even at best these parties of pilgrims are a
miserable, half-decomposed lot, with bundles of filthy rags. When anybody
dies on the road, attempts--generally successful--are invariab