The people here have suffered dreadfully from the famine, and have lost nearly all their cattle from the same cause. Our camp is surrounded by crowds of beggars, famished, gaunt and wizened creatures, most sorry objects to behold. Boys and girls, of from ten to twenty years of age, wan, pinched, and wrinkled, whine around us in piteous tones all day and all night, and vainly call on Ali for aid. “Ahajo! (for Agha ján) gushna am, yak puli siyah bidih!” (“Dear sir! I am hungry; give me a supper!”) is the burden of each one’s prayer; whilst “Yá Alí-í-í-í!” resounds on all sides from those too helpless to move from the spots doomed to be their deathbeds. These prolonged plaintive cries in the stillness of night were distressing to hear, and enough to move the hardest hearts. To us these frequent evidences of such fearful and widespread suffering were the more distressing from our utter inability to afford any real relief. Poor creatures! there is no help for them. Hundreds of those we have seen must die, for they are past recovery even were relief at hand.
The district of Tabbas comprises the divisions or bulúk of Gúnábád, Kakhak, Bijistan, Tún, and Tabbas. The last contains the capital city of that name. The whole district has suffered fearfully during the famine by death, emigration, and raids. Some of the smaller hamlets have been entirely depopulated, and many villages have been decimated. We heard of one village in the Tún bulúk, in which not a man nor child was left, and only five old women remained to till the ground, in hopes of some of their people returning. It is not quite easy to understand the cause of the famine in these parts, for the villages are mostly well watered and their fields fertile.
17th April.—Bijistan to Yúnasi, twenty-six miles. The weather during our halt at Bijistan was close and oppressive, and on the eve of our departure set in stormy, with violent gusts of wind from the south. At daylight this morning a sharp thunderstorm with hail and rain burst over our camp, and continued with violence for nearly three hours.
Our route was in a N.N.E. direction, down a long sloping steppe, with interrupted hill ridges on either hand, down to the kavír or “salt-desert,” which here projects an arm eastward to join that of Herat. At about the twelfth mile we passed the village of Sihfarsakh, at the foot of a white marble hill to the right; and at three miles farther on halted at a roadside ábambár for breakfast. On the way to this we passed a small camp of Baloch gypsies—a very poor, dirty, black, and villanous-looking set. The vegetation here differs from what we have seen in the highlands of Gháyn and Tabbas, and resembles that we observed on the plains of Calá Koh. The characteristic plants are ghích, wormwood, wild rue, caroxylon, and other saltworts, the wild liquorice, and a variety of flowering herbs, such as gentian, prophet flower, malcomia, and other crucifers, &c.
At four miles farther on, passing amongst some low hills, we left the fortified village of Márandez a couple of miles to the left, and entered on the wide waste of the kavír; and at another four miles reached the village of Yúnasi, where we camped. The sun shone hotly here, and a strong north wind blowing all day filled the atmosphere with clouds of saline dust, very trying to the lungs and eyes. On approaching the town, a number of its people, headed by an athlete wielding a pair of huge wooden dumb-bells, came out to meet us, and merrily conducted us to our camp. Yúnasi is a collection of about two hundred and fifty houses round a central fort, and possesses a commodious sarae built of baked bricks. It stands on a small river flowing westward into the desert, and marking the boundary between the districts of Tabbas and Turbat Hydari. There are no gardens here, and a singular absence of trees gives the place a very forlorn look, quite in keeping with the aspect of the desert around. The place has been almost depopulated by the famine. Yúnasi is about 2860 feet above the sea.
Our next stage was Abdullahabad, twenty-five miles. After crossing the river or Rúdi Kavír by a red brick bridge a little below the town (there are said to be seven similar bridges across the river in different parts of its course), we went across a wide lacustrine hollow, the soil of which was light and powdery, and white with saline efflorescence, and at half-way came to Miandih, “the midway village,” and halted at its ábambár for breakfast. The village consists of perhaps a hundred domed huts, ranged outside a square fort fast falling to decay, and has a vertical windmill similar to those used in Sistan, only made to work with an east wind. The desert here runs from east to west between high hill ranges, and is almost bare of vegetation beyond the wild rue and liquorice, and a coarse grass growing in tufts, with here and there strips of camel-thorn and salsolaceæ.
Along the line of march we passed several roadside graves, the last resting-places of famine-struck travellers hastily buried by their companions. Wild beasts had pulled out the bodies from three or four of these shallow pits, and scattered their bones and clothes upon the road. Thousands upon thousands have been so put away, or left to rot on the roads where they lay. Their place knows them no more, and but too often none are left to reck their loss.
From Miandih our route continued in an E.N.E. direction over a wide plain covered with a scanty pasture, on which we found large herds of camels, oxen, and asses at graze. They belong to Baloch nomads of the Mirzá Jahán tribe, and are tended by small unarmed parties of their herdsmen. We have all along noticed that the peasantry of Persian Khorassan, unlike those of Afghanistan, are all unarmed. This is the more surprising as a new feature on the scene here warns us that we have come into the country which from time immemorial has been the hunting-ground of the real Turkman. The whole plain is dotted all over with hundreds of round towers as places of refuge from these marauders, and they serve also to convey a very lively idea of the insecurity of the country. These towers consist of a circular mud wall about twelve feet high, enclosing an empty roofless space about eighteen feet in diameter, and are entered by a small opening on one side, only large enough to admit of entrance on all fours. On the appearance of the raiders the shepherds or husbandmen desert their flocks and fields, and rush into these refuges till the enemy has disappeared. The Turkman has a lively dread of firearms, and a very wholesome respect for all armed travellers. He always gives these towers a wide berth, and only attacks the unwary and unarmed. From all we heard of them, they must be sorry cowards before a worthy foe, and heartless tyrants over their helpless captives. Those who used formerly to raid this country, and who do still occasionally as opportunity offers, belong to the Sarúc and Sálor tribes, whose seat is in the territories of Sarrakhs and Marv. With the Takka Turkmans of the latter place, they habitually harry all this country up to the very gates of Mashhad. In 1860, the Persian Government sent an expedition against the strongholds of these miscreants. Though the Persian troops were driven back with disastrous loss, they managed to inflict considerable damage upon the enemy, and for several years their inroads upon this frontier were put a stop to; but in the disorganisation and laxity of authority produced by the famine they have again commenced their wonted forays, and during the last three years have, it is said, carried off nearly twenty thousand Persian subjects from Mashhad district alone, for the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhára. During the pressure of the famine, we are told, the citizens of Mashhad used to flock out to the plains on purpose to be captured by the Turkman, preferring a crust of bread in slavery to the tortures of a slow death under the heedless rule of their own governors, who never stirred a finger to alleviate their sufferings or relieve their necessities. This species of voluntary exile soon grew to such alarming proportions that the Mashhad authorities were obliged to post military guards to prevent the citizens from leaving the city.
At about ten miles from Miandih we came to the ruins of a very extensive town, called Fyzabad, and beyond them passed the modern village of the same name. It is a remarkable place, and consists of a compact little town, sunk below the level of the ground, surrounded by a deep ditch, and ramparts but little raised above the general level of the plain. Within are many trees, the tops of which only are seen above the ramparts. Here the road turns due north to Abdullahabad, four miles distant, leaving the new fort of Husenabad standing boldly out on the plain away to the right.
At Fyzabad we were met by an isticbál party of thirty or forty horsemen, headed by Hájí Agha Beg and Muhammad Karím, expressly deputed to meet us by the prince-governor of Mashhad and Husen Ali Khán, the governor of the town. They received us in a very polite and friendly manner, and conducted us to a garden house on the skirts of the town, where, as we entered its gate, a couple of sheep were sacrificed on our path, with such haste and clumsiness, that ourselves and followers were sprinkled with the blood spurting from their severed throats. The quarters prepared for us were tastefully furnished in the Persian fashion, and on a carpeted platform, under the shade of some fine mulberry trees, and on the edge of a sparkling little stream, we were refreshed with iced sherbets and trays of sweetmeats, accompanied by the inevitable calyán and coffee.