As to natural trees there are none, and even the bushes are few and unlovely, chiefly camel thorn and a rigid and thorny tamarisk. Beyond Kûm there is no made road. A track worn by the caravans of ages exists,--sometimes parallel ruts for a width of half a mile, sometimes not two yards wide, and now and then lapsing into illegibility. There are large and small caravanserais of an inferior class along the route, and _chapar khanas_ at intervals. Water is often bad and sometimes brackish. It is usually supplied from small brick _abambars_, or covered reservoirs. Milk is hard to obtain, often impossible; at some places fowls can be bought for eightpence each, and "flap jacks" everywhere.
Except the snowy cone of Demavend, with purple ranges curtaining his feet, no special object of admiration exists; the plains are reddish, yellowish, barren, gravelly, or splotched with salt; the ranges of hills, which are never far off (for Persia is a land of mountains), are either shapeless and gravelly, or rocky, rugged, and splintered, their hue reddish and purplish, their sides scored by the spring rush of wasted torrents, their aspect one of complete desolation, yet not without a certain beauty at this season--rose-flushed in the early morning, passing through shades of cobalt and indigo through the day, and dying away at sunset in translucent amethyst against a sky of ruddy gold.
But, take away the atmospheric colouring--which the advancing heat will abolish--and the plain English of the route is this, that in every direction, far as the eye can reach, the country is a salt waste or a gravelly waste, with a few limited oases of cultivation on the plains and in the folds of the hills, always treeless, except round a few of the villages, where there are small groves of poplars and willows. The villages are clusters of mud hovels, scarcely distinguishable from the wastes, and many of them are ruined and deserted, oppressive exactions or a failure of water being common reasons for a migration. These dismal ruins are shapeless heaps of mud, the square towers of the square walls alone retaining any semblance of form.
Long lines of choked _kanaats_, denoted by their crumbling shafts, attest the industrious irrigation of a former day. Tracks wind wearily among shrunken villages, or cross ridges of mud or gravel to take their unlovely way over arid stony plains. Unwatered tracts of land, once cultivated, as the _kanaats_ show, but now deserts of sand and stones, send up gyrating clouds of gritty dust.