From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People

by Sven Anders Hedin

"Twenty-three," is answered from several directions.

"That is enough; pack up." The slaves and the stolen goods are bound fast on dromedaries. "Quick, quick," shouts the chief. "Back the way we came." In the hurry and confusion some of the animals get entangled in one another's ropes. "Back! Back!" The chieftain's practised eye has detected a party of armed men coming up. Three shots are heard in the darkness, and Shah Sevar falls backwards out of the saddle, while his dromedary starts and flies off into the desert. The rider's left foot is caught fast in the stirrup and his head drags in the dust. A bullet has entered his forehead, but the blood is staunched by the dust of the road. His foot slips out of the stirrup, and the "Riding King" lies dead as a stone outside Bam.

Another robber is severely wounded and is cut to pieces by the townsmen. Bam has waked up. The entangled dromedaries with their burdens of slaves and goods are captured, but the rest of the party, twelve riders with ten baggage camels, have vanished in the darkness, pursued by some infuriated dogs. Sixteen of the inhabitants of the town are missing. The whole thing has taken place in half an hour. Bam sleeps no more this night.

Now the dromedaries are urged on to the uttermost; they have double loads to carry, but they travel as quickly as they came. The kidnapped children cease to cry, and fall asleep with weariness and the violent swaying motion. The party rides all night and all the next day without stopping, and the robbers often look round to see if they are pursued. They rest for the first time at the salt spring, posting a look-out on an adjacent mound. They eat and drink without losing a minute, and get ready for the rest of the ride. The captives are paralysed with fright; the young women are half choked with weeping, and a little lad in a tattered shirt goes about crying vainly for his mother. The eyes of the captives are blindfolded with white bandages that they may not notice the way they are travelling and try later to escape back to Bam. Then the headlong ride is resumed, and after eight days the troop of riders is back at home with their booty, but without their chief.

Innumerable raids of this kind have scourged eastern Persia, and in the same way Turkomans have devastated Khorasan in the north-east. On the eastern frontier it is the Kurds who are the robbers. In this disturbed frontier region there is not a town without its small primitive mud fort or outlook tower.

Scorpions

On running dromedaries we now ride on eastwards through northern Baluchistan. Dry, burnt-up desert tracts, scantily clothed with thistles and shrubs, moving dunes of fine yellow sand, low hill ridges disintegrated by alternate heat and cold—such is the country where a few nomads wander about with their flocks, and the stranger often wonders how the animals find a living. In certain valleys, however, there is pasture and also water, and sometimes belts of thriving tamarisks are passed, and bushes of saxaul with green leafy branches, hard wood, and roots which penetrate down to the moisture beneath the surface.

The great caravan road we are following is, however, exceedingly desolate. Only at the stations is water to be found, and even that is brackish; but the worst trial is the heat, which now, at the end of April, becomes more oppressive every day. The temperature rises nearly up to 105-1/2° in the shade, and to ride full in the face of the sun is like thrusting one's head into a blazing furnace. When there is a wind we are all right, and the sand whirls like yellow ghosts over the heated ground. But when the air is calm the outlines of the hills seem to quiver in the heat, and the barrel of a gun which has been out in the sun blisters the hands on being touched. In the height of the summer the Baluchis wrap strips of felt round their stirrup-irons to protect the dromedaries from burns on the flanks.

This region is one of the hottest in the world. The sun stands so high at mid-day that the shadows of the dromedaries disappear beneath them. You long for sunset, when the shadows lengthen out and the worst of the heat is over. It is not really cool even at night, when, moreover, you are plagued with whole swarms of gnats.

Baluchistan and Persia abound with scorpions, which are indeed to be found in all the hot regions of the five continents. About two hundred species have been distinguished. Some are quite small, others six inches long. Some are dark-brown, others reddish, and others again straw-yellow, as in Baluchistan. The body consists of a head and thorax without joints, and a hinder part of seven articulated rings, besides six tail rings. The last ring, the thirteenth, contains two poison glands and is furnished with a sting as fine as a needle. The poison is a fluid clear as water.