CHAPTER VIII.

Across the “Desert of despair.”

For some hours we are traversing a singularly wild-looking country; it seems as though the odds and ends of all creation were tossed indiscriminately together.  Rocky cliffs, sloping hills, riverbeds, dry save from last night’s thunder-storm, bits of sandy desert, strips of alkaline flat or hard gravel, have been gathered up from various parts of the earth and tossed carelessly in a heap here.  It is an odd corner in which the chips, the sweepings and trimmings, gathered up after the terrestrial globe was finished, were apparently brought and dumped.  There is even a little bit of pasture, and at one point a little area of arable land.  Here are found four half-naked representatives of this strange, wild border-land, living beneath one rude goat-hair tent, watching over a few grazing goats and several acres of growing grain.

We arrive at this remarkable little community shortly after noon, and halt a couple of hours to rest and feed the horses, and to kill and cook the unhappy kid slung across the mudbake’s saddle.  The poor little creature doesn’t require very much killing; all the way from where it was given into his tender charge its infantile bleatings have seemed to grate harshly on the mudbake’s unsympathetic ear, and he has handled it anywise but tenderly.  The four men found here are Persian Eliautes, a numerous tribe, that seem to form a sort of connecting link between the genuine nomads and the tillers of the soil.  They are frequently found combining the occupations of both, and might aptly be classed as semi-nomads.  Pitching their tents beside some outlying, isolated piece of cultivable ground in the spring, they sow it with wheat or barley, and three months later they reap a supply of grain to carry away with them when they remove their flocks to winter pasturage.

An iron kettle is borrowed to stew the kid in, and when cooked a portion is stowed away to carry with us.  The Eliaute quartette contribute bowls of mast and doke, and off this and the remainder of the stewed kid we all make a hearty meal.

More than once of late have I been impressed by the striking, even startling, resemblance of some person among the people of Southern Khorassan, to the familiar face of some acquaintance at home.  And, strange it is, but true, that one of these four Eliautes blossoms forth upon my astonished vision as the veritable double of one of America’s most prominent knights of the pen and wheel.  The gentleman himself, an enthusiastic tourist, and to use his own expression, fond of “walking large,” has taken considerable interest in my tour of the world.  Can it be—­I think, upon first confronting this extraordinary reproduction—­can it be, that Karl Kron’s enthusiasm has caused him to start from the Pacific coast of China on his wheel to try and beat my time in circumcycling the globe?