'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From January 1863 to December 1864. (Edited by the Secretary.) Volume XVII.' [‎136] (303/524)

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136 RECENT TOUR ROUND THE NORTHERN
to our right was Imam Hassan, with a very white dome and two date
trees, hut the sandstone range intervened between us and it.
Many small nullahs crossed this basin; there was a little brush
wood, and a little grass, and one or two flocks of sheep. At 11-20 we
passed a ridge of sandstone just cropping out and running nearly East
and West. It was redder than the surrounding ranges.
At 11-30 we passed a peculiar rock. A cone stuck on a cube. The
whole was on a detached mass of stone about sixty feet high.
And now we descended towards the sea between irregular sandstone
cliffs, red at the base but grey towards the top, by a road which was
very difficult for our baggage animals. Here we met families of men
women, and children, with sheep and donkeys laden with household
kit moving North to flassar.
They told us that they belong to Kellah Hussar, but that ten days
ago the Eliant horsemen came down upon them from the regions of
Behbehan, and they fled to Baugh. They were now returning.
Here our road lay amongst masses of rock. It looked as if a great
torrent had swept through the place, undermining some of the rocks
entirely, so that they had fallen down and broken into cubes, while
others had been hollowed out along one side only, and falling down
obliquely, looked like the roofs of great houses.
At 127 we found a horizontal stratum of gypsum, about half a foot
thick, appearing from under the sandstone on a level with the road,
and about fifty yards further on plates of the same mineral, a quarter
of an inch thick, turned edgeways and crossing the road. The
plates were from one to six feet apart, and we crossed them for three
or four hundred yards, when we came on gypsum in another form—
plates white, crystalline, opaque, and about one inch thick. Those took
the same direction as the thinner plates, and became intermingled with
them, and thus continued till 12-27, when the character of the country
changed, and the sandstone became mouse-coloured. The whole now
looked like the debris of a gigantic quarry well washed down by rain
and glistening with fragments of gypsum. At 12-45 the country
became more open, and we again saw the sea, and now we entered a
second basin about two miles broad, with some grass, brushwood, and
patches of cultivation for the first half, but the remainder bare and salt,
with heie a small creek from the sea and there a nullah from the hills.
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