Sport in Eastern Persia

Black Partridges 5
and flourishing country. The ruins of this
Zahidan (or Zarang), through which we were
passing, extend north and south for many
miles. For centuries it remained a flourishing
city, till a fatal day when, as legend has it, the
great Timur, "lord of Thrace and Samarkand,"
besieged it and was beaten back, receiving
at the
same time the wound which made him for ever
Timur lang, the lame Timur. His revenge was
characteristic of the time. Returning, he took
and "utterly destroyed the city," and not
only it, but the canal system on which its
prosperity depended ; and so it remains to this
day, sown with salt. Farther south lie the
ruin-covered tracts of Tarakun and Sarotar, now
a still more hideous desert, for the river has
turned its back and left them.
Lunch in the shadow of a ruined archway,
and then, as the Persians say, we "fall" on our
road, which here lies amid wind-driven burkhans,
those crescent -shaped dunes, which advancing in
procession under the pressure of the Seistan
wind, in turn lay bare and engulf everything
that lies in their path. Year by year the
inhabitants of many a village are forced to
shift elsewhere. Such a one we passed that
morning, making
its last stand with barricades
of tamarisks against the encroaching foe.