Leaving Quetta by a morning train I was again passing through a region mountainous on either side beyond a plain white with leprous-like tracts of salt. It resembled neither frost nor snow, but was a strange blotchy incrustation as if the earth were smitten with some fearful pestilence.
On one side the mountains were grey with violet shadows following their clefts and scoriations, spotted in places by dark leafless shrubs, and on their summits lay a little snow. On the other side the hills were red with only soft warm hints of shadows, and beyond them was a band of filmy blue almost as light as the sky. Soon, as the train raced on, the intervening plain became strewn with small loose boulders and isolated tufts of dry dead prickly bush. Two long tents like giant slugs hugged the ground with their black bodies, and near them a few scattered sheep hunted the sparse nourish of aridity.
Again I passed Bostan Junction, this time, however, instead of going on towards Chaman, turning to follow round the Eastern arm of the loop by what is called the Harnai Route. The landscape had quite altered, but was still strange and unhealthy looking. A veritable pigment seemed to exude from it, varying in different parts of the same field of vision. The outlines were noble but the colour, instead of being the effect of light and air upon masses either of local uniformity or varied by differences as of flowers or vegetation, was by this frequent change in the hue of the earth itself too prismatic for majesty and too trivial for grandeur. A rugged pile of grey rock will receive from the procession of the hours indescribable glories, but a mass of mixed French fondants squashed into the same shape could never capture a tithe of such beauty. In chalky half-tones the landscape ran the entire gamut of reds, yellows, blues and greens, with an appearance of false sweetness as if the face of earth had been smeared with pigment destroying all natural glow.
And yet—and yet—as noon grew nearer and the hovering heat made all things hazy and indistinct, where all merged and was lost, and nothing began or ended, surely that was beautiful—earth mother—mother-o'-pearl.
After leaving Mangi Station the train approached the famous Chappa Rift where a vast and sudden break in the mountain makes a wide stupendous chasm, with steep perpendicular sides. I was permitted to ride upon the locomotive for this part of the journey and watch this wild and desolate magnificence of nature's architecture unfold its terrible titanic grandeur. At one point the railway crosses the rift by an iron bridge called after the Duchess of Connaught. Entering a tunnel in the vast wall of rock the train emerges again at one end of the bridge, and after crossing the gulf turns along the other side so that for some long time this narrowest part remains in sight, the maroon red ironwork of the bridge staring dramatically in the centre of a desolate landscape of silver grey. No patch of grass or shrub or any other live thing is to be seen—only the immensity of the scale is marked by one small block-house, a minute sentinel which shows against the sky on the tallest height of cliff.
As the journey continued, the rocks took more fantastic shapes and above a steely gleaming river and its grey beach of stones, the cliff became like serried rows of crumbling columns as if some cyclopean Benares uplifted by earthquake reared its line of petrified palaces against the sky.