'Lord Curzon's Notes on Persia' [‎388r] (776/1386)

388
Geo. Proc.— GOLDSMID.
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The next section of the journey under consideration includes a partial
experience of the Kavir—a word which St. John interprets a “ salt
swamp,” Fraser, a “ salt desert whether wet or dry,” and the dictionary,
“ saluginous ground where nothing grows.” If either of these interpre
tations be correct, the term Dasht-i-Kavir, in reference to a considerable
portion of Khurasan, should be rendered the “ Desert of Salt,” and not,
as in many maps, the “ Great Desert,” a rendering which implies the
use of the common Arabic word kabir, localised into kavir, “great.”
Macgregor came upon what he calls “ a bit of real kavir ” on his way
from Yazd to Tabbas through Khoor. He describes it as dark soil,
covered with a thick efflorescence, glittering painfully to the eye, with
out a blade of grass or leaf of any kind, or living thing; adding
that this vast ground of white, apparent everywhere, not smooth but
honeycombed with small holes, contains occasional dark patches of moist
earth, which in time dry up and become salt. Marco Polo’s route from
Kuhbinan to Tabbas and Damaghan—according to Itinerary No. L, and
other suggested identifications in Sir Henry Yule’s valuable edition of
the Venetian traveller’s record,—may well be supposed to take in some
thing of kavir. It was not improbably part of the “ desert of surpassing
aridity, which lasts for some eight days,” where “ are neither fruits nor
trees to be seen, and what water there is is bitter and bad,” * for such
description is not discordant with modern results.
But according to St. John, the great kavir—formed by the drainage of
the Shurab and Karasii rivers from the west, and a considerable affluent
from Turshiz on the east—has only been once seen by a European. This
was Dr. Biihse, a Russian, who crossed it about latitude 34° when
travelling from Damaghan to Yezd, and who described it as about
nine versts, or six miles wide. Macgregor could not have been very far
from it, when at the above-mentioned oasis of Khoor, which he makes
210 miles south of Semnan and 175 north of Yezd, but which he
expressly states is situated south of “ the kavir."
Lieutenant Vaughan’s fourth stage from Yazd initiated him into the
mysteries of this peculiar formation in its more ordinary aspect. “ On
our left,” he says, “ a kavir is visible, stretching away for many miles to
the west. After crossing a narrow neck of it, we halt in the desert.”
The second march following, he halts in a ravine, “ which drains the
low and sandy hills ” on his right “ into the kavir.” On his seventh
march he is in a desolate sandy waste “almost touching the kavir.”
Nine days later, after “ crossing a watershed whose elevation is
4700 feet,” he descends “ gently down a watercourse, running north-east
into the basin of the D ash t-i-Kavir.” We are now about to behold the
phenomenon in its more special character. But before reading to you
his own description of the scene before him, I will briefly retrace his
progress up to this point.
Leaving Yazd on the 30th March, he travelled over a sandy plain,
partly bounded by rocky hills, passed through the Parsi village of
Kalanta, containing some fifty or sixty houses, and arrived on the 1st
April at the Chah-i-Kuh Heriz, a place of Parsi pilgrimage. Here he
found a shrine erected in memory of a Parsi maiden who, to avoid her
Muhammadan pursuers, prayed that she might disappear into the
ground—an aspiration which is said to have been instantly realised t
The legend has its counterpart in Sind, and its venue has been pointed
out to me when riding over the frontier of that province into the neigh
bouring Mekran.
On the 3rd April he was at the village of Toot, noted as pic
turesque, with a few houses, cultivation, and an old caravanserai A roadside inn providing accommodation for caravans (groups of travellers). .
On the 5th he reached the foot of the Siah-kuh, “a mountain of
considerable elevation, though not snow-capped, and evidently of
volcanic origin; ” and the next day he halted at Chh Gumbaz,
the well at which place was reported to be haunted by evil spirits—
several people coming to draw water there having fallen dead at
its edge ! The 7th April was rendered memorable to the whole party
by a storm of great violence. They had ascended a high range of
* Yule’s ‘ Marco Polo,’ vol. i. p. 131.