Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/267

 claims about seventy houses.^ These miserable habitations are built of mud, with vaulted roofs, each joined to the other, and resembling the top of exaggerated graves. The people raise a few melons and a scant supply of wheat and barley, but our own observation was that a plentiful crop of bleached skeletons of horses and pack-animals seemed to be the chief product of the barren soil. I hope that Alexander's * rations for two days ' served him well when he reached this forlorn settlement, halting perhaps near the Kalah-i Dah Namak, or some equally wretched fortress of the village, a couple of hundred yards to the south of the present caravansarai — for I presume that the whole place was just as distressed then as it is today. ^ I wished that our own stay might have been shortened; but, as usual at Dah Namak, there was no fresh relay of horses to be had, and we were obliged to wait till our tired nags could get some rest.

Alexander must gladly have given orders for the trumpet to sound the march from this unattractive place, but the road itself was not a whit more inviting. Even a rill of water from an artificially dug kandt ^ near Husainabad tasted of brine, and the only traces of vegetation were the prickly camel-thorn and the scrubby sipand^^ although a mirage lake, which floated tantalizingly before our vision, seemed to indicate the presence of moisture in the distance. Two hours later, under a broiling sun, we drew up at a group of clay dwellings, clustered to- gether within a walled enclosure, and known as Abdulabad, a place of about twenty-five inhabitants, with *a few chickens and children,' as my memorandum noted. If the Greeks halted to rest their horses at this or some kindred post, where water

1 This was the figure given me in Kalah at Dah Namak may now be 1910. The number ' fifty poor huts ' seen in Lacoste, Around Afghanistan, was given twenty years before by Ken- p. 10, tr. by Anderson, New York, nedy, A Journey in Khorassan and 1909.

Central Asia, p. 13, London, 1891 (pri- a An underground canal, see below,

vately printed by Hatchards) . p. 159.

2 A picture of the interior of the * See above, p. 119.

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