NOTE 1. ["The present road from Kerman to Kubenan is to Zerend about 50 miles, to the Sar i Benan 15 miles, thence to Kubenan 30 miles—­total 95 miles.  Marco Polo cannot have taken the direct road to Kubenan, as it took him seven days to reach it.  As he speaks of waterless deserts, he probably took a circuitous route to the east of the mountains, via Kuhpayeh and the desert lying to the north of Khabis.” (Houtum-Schindler, l.c. pp. 496-497.) (Cf. Major Sykes, ch. xxiii.)—­H.  C.]

NOTE 2.—­This description of the Desert of Kerman, says Mr. Khanikoff, “is very correct.  As the only place in the Desert of Lut where water is found is the dirty, salt, bitter, and green water of the rivulet called Shor-Rud (the Salt River), we can have no doubt of the direction of Marco Polo’s route from Kerman so far.”  Nevertheless I do not agree with Khanikoff that the route lay N.E. in the direction of Ambar and Kain, for a reason which will appear under the next chapter.  I imagine the route to have been nearly due north from Kerman, in the direction of Tabbas or of Tun.  And even such a route would, according to Khanikoff’s own map, pass the Shor-Rud, though at a higher point.

I extract a few lines from that gentleman’s narrative:  “In proportion as we got deeper into the desert, the soil became more and more arid; at daybreak I could still discover a few withered plants of Caligonum and Salsola, and not far from the same spot I saw a lark and another bird of a whitish colour, the last living things that we beheld in this dismal solitude....  The desert had now completely assumed the character of a land accursed, as the natives call it.  Not the smallest blade of grass, no indication of animal life vivified the prospect; no sound but such as came from our own caravan broke the dreary silence of the void.” (Mem. p. 176.)

[Major P. Molesworth Sykes (Geog.  Jour. X. p. 578) writes:  “At Tun, I was on the northern edge of the great Dash-i-Lut (Naked Desert), which lay between us and Kerman, and which had not been traversed, in this particular portion, since the illustrious Marco Polo crossed it, in the opposite direction, when travelling from Kerman to ‘Tonocain’ via Cobinan.”  Major Sykes (Persia, ch. iii.) seems to prove that geographers have, without sufficient grounds, divided the great desert of Persia into two regions, that to the north being termed Dasht-i-Kavir, and that further south the Dasht-i-Lut—­and that Lut is the one name for the whole desert, Dash-i-Lut being almost a redundancy, and that Kavir (the arabic Kafr) is applied to every saline swamp.  “This great desert stretches from a few miles out of Tehran practically to the British frontier, a distance of about 700 miles.”—­H.  C.]