'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From January 1863 to December 1864. (Edited by the Secretary.) Volume XVII.' [‎144] (313/524)

144 REMARKS ON A RECENT JOURNEY
caravans passing for an unknown succession of years have worked the
rock into foot-holes, and the bowlder-strewn parts into a marked line.
It is astonishing how the trade of a country faces such a route. \
fursac from Daulekee—after traversing that is the lowest hill-range -
you reach a drinkable spring at the head of a long, narrow pass, which
winds down to the next valley, along wnich falls the Daulekee river.
The water of this river is undrinkahly brackish. One of my followers
who bathed in it during a hot march was seized with a raving thirst.
A bridge which once crossed this impetuous flood was carried away, and
has not been replaced. You have now to cross the stream three
several times, and in winter or in spring caravans are sometimes delayed
many days on its banks, and it is reported that many packages and
some mules are annually lost in the flood while crossing. Having
crossed this river, the track lies for a fursac along its banks, gradually
leaving it and winding up to a steep kutal or precipitous pass, on the
summit of which rests the Khisht plain.
16. The kutals along this line are (with the exception of that of
the Kutabi-Dokhtar) all of one description. Take a corkscrew, stamp it
into a steeply inclined plain, and you have a kutal. It is, in fact, the
track which mules and rain have scoured in a zigzag down the face of
a precipitous hillside : this kutal would be impracticable for mounted
guns. No water is findable along this stage after leaving the spring
above noticed.
17. Khisht may he described as a plain of an irregular oval, some
ten miles in length, five broad, and surrounded by hills, unless at the
point where it overlooks the brink of the kutal already described. A.
river which winds down through the hills past the old ruins of Shapour,
and which bears that name (Shapour), enters the Khisht plain in a fine
and drinkable stream on its Eastern side, and keeping close below the
hills, which skirt the plain on its Eastern and Northern sides, passes
below the town and fort of Khisht, and finally descends to the Gulf far
to the Northward, on the Brihbahoon and Shushter line.
18. Numerous water-ducts have been cut across the plain leading
from the river-bed, and this portion of the plain is well cultivated with
wheat, barley, rice, tobacco, and cotton; it contains also extensive date
groves : perhaps upwards of 20,000 date trees may be found. The
plain is further dotted with old stumps of trees and brushwood. In the