In the Rainless Districts vegetation is a nullity; it becomes reduced to a very small number of saline plants and dwarf bushes, nourished by the brackish waters which, the soil conceals. Finally, the desert region may not only be compared to a sea in its aspect and immensity, but it is a true sea, or at least the bed of an ancient sea, which formerly communicated, and, perhaps, was confounded with the Mediterranean, and whose drying up, though still incomplete, took place at a recent geological epoch. We may reasonably conclude that, owing to a series of gradual upheavals, this sea was at first broken up into vast lagoons; that most of these successively disappeared, but not without leaving some certain evidences of the primitive submersion of the continent. “If we might hazard a conjecture,” says a recent writer,[41] “it would be that the same convulsions and upheavals which at the close of the tertiary epoch indented the southern coasts of Europe, at the same time drained the ocean which hitherto had rolled over the plains of the Sahara, and submerged the low-lying lands, which probably united the Canaries and Madeira to the mainland.” To a similar cause must be attributed the existence of the subterranean waters, springs, ponds, and salt lakes, of which I have already spoken, and of the inland seas—the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and the Dead Sea; while the Black Sea and its offshoots, the Sea of Azov and the Sea of Marmora, must have had the same origin. I shall discuss this subject further when describing the Great Sahara.
In Eastern and Central Asia, the Sandy or Salt Deserts alternate with the Steppes, and with lands susceptible of a certain amount of cultivation. The vast region which geographers designate the Great Gobi, or the Shamo, is intersected by many grassy Steppes and even by fertile fields, where the sedentary Mongols, and especially the Artons, yearly sow and gather hemp, millet, and buckwheat. The sombre picture of “a barren plain of shifting sand blown into high ridges where the summer sun is scorching, no rain falls, and when thick fog occurs it is only the precursor of fierce winds,”[42] is true only of special districts, such as the Han-hai, or “Dry Sea,” or the Desert of Sarkha. There, for instance, we meet with no other vegetable than the salsolæ, or salt-worts, which flourish around the small saline pools. Of these pools, when seen from a distance, Mr. Atkinson notices a remarkable characteristic: the salt crystals which accrete upon their banks frequently reflect the orange or crimson hues of flowers, and resemble glowing rubies set in a rich mounting.
As we advance in a south-easterly direction, we find the features of the desert region more prominently marked.
Immense plains of sand, with a bare and brackish surface, called Bejaban, traverse the whole of Persia, from the Caspian Sea to the Indus. They comprise the Deserts of Kerusan, Seistan, Beloochistan, and Mekran, rich in salts with a basis of soda. “The coasts of the Persian Gulf,” as Mrs. Somerville remarks, “are burning hot sandy solitudes, so completely barren, that the country from Bassora to the Indus, a distance of 1200 miles, is nearly a sterile waste. Three-tenths of Persia is a desert, and the tableland is nearly a wide scene of desolation. A great salt-desert occupies 27,000 square miles between Irak and Khorasan, of which the soil is a stiff clay, covered with efflorescence of common salt and nitre, often an inch thick, varied only by a few saline plants and patches of verdure in the hollows. This dreary waste joins the large sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman. Khelat, the capital of Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the sea; round it there is cultivation, but the greater part of that country is a lifeless plain, over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the north wind into ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet high, without a vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose hot and pestilential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these dismal sands impassable at certain seasons.”
The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the Indus. That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, is more than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes that the actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern landscapes which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those provinces where the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, the scene would hardly remind the traveller of
“That delightful province of the Sun.
The first of Persian lands he shines upon,
Where all the loveliest children of his beam.
Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream.”[43]
“To bare, dry mountain-ridges,” says M. Forgues, “succeed plains, sometimes incrusted with hard clay, sometimes clothed with thick sand. At the outset of spring, in the months of April and May, the country is coloured with some softer tints, the grass breaks here and there through the granite and the gravel; but in the first summer heats everything grows dry, and the soil resumes its monotonously brown or gray livery. Water fails for cultivation, which in the best districts is confined to a few scattered oases. In these vast spaces, when the eye surveys them from some mountain-crest, there occurs nothing to arrest the gaze; and when once the spring has past, the cultured fields become blended with those which the plough has suffered to lie fallow, the clay-built villages with the earth of which their walls are constructed. In these confused landscapes even a considerable town scarcely traces its blurred outline among the accumulated ruins in whose centre it persists in living, and whose extent attests its decadence. It is a marvel if, on arriving at the limit of these monotonous plains, the traveller distinguishes them from the deserts to whose threshold they have generally conducted him. He only recognizes the latter by the dazzling gleam of their saline efflorescence, which stretches far out of sight, and where at intervals abruptly projects some mass of ebon-black rock, transformed by the solar refraction, and assuming in quick succession the most fantastic aspects.”
I have spoken of the inland seas and salt lakes which testify to the primitive submersion of the whole region of the Great Deserts. Let us pursue our route towards the west, and we shall encounter the most remarkable of these vestiges of a remote past.
First, I shall speak of the Dead Sea, the Lake Asphaltes, which Dean Stanley justly designates “one of the most remarkable spots in the world,” and which, as the reader knows, is situated in the south of Palestine, at a short distance from Jerusalem. It is true that “a great mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the effect, partly the cause, of the old belief that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years. The glittering surface of the lake, with the thin mist of its own evaporations floating over its surface, will now no more be taken for a gloomy sea, sending forth sulphurous exhalations. The birds which pass over it without injury have long ago destroyed the belief that no living creature could survive the baneful atmosphere which hung upon its waters.” But still, for the scientific no less than for the historical student, it possesses an absorbing interest. It is the most depressed sheet of water in the world, lying fully thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean: as the Lake Sir-i-Kol, where the Oxus rises
“In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,”