"أيام ثيم ولَّت" [و‎‎٤‎٩] (٢٤٨/٩٧)

50
enough these same people would gladly take jobs in some
depressing Northern British industrial town and think it bliss
No doubt cinemas, discotheques, and plenty of readily available
fat white women counts for more at a certain stage of culture
than scenery and wild-life!
Apart from passing through the customs, one's contact with
Persians was virtually nil. They were forbidden by Riza Shah to
mix with foreigners, so until I reached Z^bul and exchanged
formal calls with the Governor of Seistan I had practically no
opportunity of meeting an educated Persian.
Seistan, (three syllables, please, meaning the land of the Sakai
or Scythians) was a country sui generis and quite untypical of
the rest of Persia, a vast depression into which the run-off from
the central mountains of Afghanistan (the ancient land of Ghor)
flows. The people, too, looked different from the ordinary run
of Persians or Afghans, having blunter features and more sturdy
figures, rather reminiscent of the Panjabi Oats or the
Kashmiris. When I arrived there, there were upwards of 4 000
square miles under water (the Helmand river ends there and never
reaches the sea) and in the winter it seemed that there was a
wild duck to every six inches of it! In the summer they would
migrate to Siberia to breed. In addition there were snipe in
myriads and black partridges or francolin in the vineyards.
The town,
road was
to reveal
was
or village, of Zabul presented a strange aspect The
bordered by high mud walls, falling down here and there
that there was nothing behind them. The explanation
that it had been honoured, a few years before, by a visit
from the Shah and the walls had been built to give his Imperial
Majesty the impression that the place was much bigger and more
populous than in fact it was.
It was June and the b ad - i - s ad-o - bTs t r" uz ('wind of 120 days’) was
blowing with its full force. It starts every year with clockwork
precision in May_and JbJows until August, having risen in the area
aptly known as Bad Khiz ('Wind-rise') adjacent to the Karaqum
desert in the extreme South of Russian Central Asia. Thence it
blows with great force down the Persian-Afqhan border South to
the Afghan-Baluchistan border where it veers to the East and
peters out. It has left a terrible mark on Seistan, for no tree
stands much more than a dozen feet or so high, and all lean over
from North to South at a sharp angle. The Seistanis build
special rooms orientated North/South with wide doorways in the
North and South walls. The North one is hung with matting made
from bull-rushes and this is kept constantly wet, which brings
down the temperature considerably. Outside was one perpetual
There was a skeleton staff of two Indian clerks, for whom, as for
me, there was no work to do, and after I had given a tea-party
tor the handful of Indian traders, I considered myself free to
proceed to my summer quarters at Blrjand. To get there it was