نسخة مذيلة من "بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي" بقلم جورج كرزون، مع أوراق مدرجة [و‎‎٦‎٣‎١] (١٨١٤/١٢٧٨)

THE EASTERN AND SOUTH-EASTERN PROVINCES 251
Himalaya between British India and Tibet. Should it ever be the
fate of Persia to submit to territorial and political partition, nature
has, in this part at any rate, saved the contracting 1 or conflicting 1
parties the expense and trouble of a Boundary Commission.
Prom the Dasht-i-Kavir, or Great Salt Desert, I turn to the
Dasht-i-Lut, or Great Sand Desert, separating Khorasan in the
^ south-east from Herman, and occupying a sorrowful
Dasht-i- parallelogram between the towns of Neh and Tabbas on
Lut the north, and Kerman and Yezd on the south. Not
that this sand desert is without salt. On the contrary salt is perhaps
its chief ingredient; but it is rarely laivir, i.e. it is rarely overlaid
either with a saline incrustation or with a briny swamp ; and it
gives birth to a few miserable desert shrubs, which is a concession
to respectability that no kavir has ever vouchsafed. The Lut, which
some too ingenious critics have fancifully endeavoured to connect
with the Lot of Holy Writ, but which is apparently a local
synonym for a wilderness, 1 is situated at a much lower level than
the Dasht-i-Kavir ; for its normal elevation is less than 2,000 feet,
and in places it sinks to only 500 feet above the sea level. Upon
the maps it occupies a staring and eloquent blank. Pew travellers
have crossed it, fewer still having done so would voluntarily re
peat the experiment. Marco Polo was here, but where was not
the invincible Venetian? In the succeeding century Priar Odo-
ricus thus described its charms, calling it the Sea of Sand :—
Now that sea is a wondrous thing and right perilous. And there
were none of us who desired to enter on that sea. Por it is all of dry
sand, without any moisture, and it shifteth, as the sea doth when in
storm, now hither, now thither ; and as it shifteth it maketh waves in
like manner as the sea doth ; so that countless people travelling thereon
have been overwhelmed and drowned, and buried in those sands. Por
when blown about and buffeted by the winds, they are raised into hills,
now in this place, now in that, according as the wind chancethto blow. 2
Khanikoff crossed the Dasht-i-Lut from Neh to Kerman in
1859. Goldsmid’s party were on its borders in 1871. Colonel
1 General Schindler, in a note in the Indian Antiquary, Dec. 1887, says that
the word lut means naked, bare ; and dasht-i-lut, therefore, the naked plain, i.e.
desert. The word lat (originally piece, bit) is frequently combined with lut in
common phraseology. Hence a man lat we lut, is a man who has nothing in the
world, a beggar. From lut is derived the Persian luti, originally a sodomite, now
a popular synonym for a buffoon or rogue.
2 From Cathay and the Way thither (Hakluyt Society), No. 36-7. '