'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎90] (123/714)

mam
PERSIA
huts, clinging to the hill side, at about two miles from the frontier
down a valley ; and here it was that, stumbling along on foot with
my bridle on my arm, I fortunately struck my camp. A glorious
moon, idealising the gaunt and sombre landscape, had cheered my
solitarv ride and guided me to my destination. There was not an
atom of verdure on the brown bleak hills ; and not a sign or sound
of life on the road except a rare caravan moving with music of
camel-bells through the silence.
The mountain range through which I had been passing, in
whose spurs and branches I spent another two days before reaching
Kuchan, and in whose rugged eastern ramifications I
Border was to wander for the ten days following, is the eastern
Mountains p ro i 011 g a tion of the great Elburz range that runs like a
mighty rock wall along the entire northern border of Persia.
Connected with the Caucasian system upon the west, it follows at
distances varying from ten to thirty miles the south coast line of
the Caspian, throwing up on its way the prodigious peak of
Demavend (19,400 ft.), until, temporarily arrested in the valley
of the Gurgan beyond Astrabad, it assumes a new lease of vigour
in the knotted mountain ridges that stand one behind the other
like infantry files, with an axis pointing from north-west to south
east, in the middle district between the Turkoman plains and the
northern skirts of the Great Persian Desert. Further on the con
nection is as distinct with the misnamed Paropamisan range above
Herat, itself a western continuation of the tremendous Hindu
Kush. In the region under examination, the border ranges on the
north are known by the names of the Kuren Dagh and Kopet Dagh,
whilst the main and still higher inland ridge, enclosing the valley
of the Atrek on the south, bears the successive names of Ala Dagh
and Binalud Kuh. The upland valleys concealed between these
parallel barriers have an average elevation of 4,000 feet, and are
dominated by peaks that claim an altitude of from 8,000 to 11,000
feet. It is said that in Khorasan alone there are not less than
sixteen summits which answer to this description. Nothing can
exceed the bleak sterility of their outward form. Unredeemed by
any verdure but a stunted and scanty growth of juniper, watered
by few springs, and with little or no soil upon the slopes, the grey
limestone tells with frank and forbidding effrontery its remote
geological tale. It was not out of keeping with the chill and
savage character of these hills that until the last decade they were