The evident success of the new route has been the more remarkable because M. Naus, the head of the Belgian administration that conducts the Persian Customs, has devised special means to check the expansion of Indian trade, two Customs officers being appointed to Nasratabad to deal with it. To give zest to their existence these men imposed many novel regulations upon caravans.[28] The camel-men are fined for the non-observance of arbitrary rules which are purposely varied so that confusion may be created; the men are thrown into prison, the animals seized and the goods confiscated. In addition, the Customs barrier in Seistan is reinforced by a plague cordon between Seistan and Khorassan against caravans from India, in spite of the fact that the period of any possible incubation has expired long before a caravan from Quetta can reach Seistan, and that the limits of time, within which quarantine is permissible, have been laid down by the decision of the Venice Sanitary Congress. The headquarters of this latest pest are at Turbat-i-Haidari and Karez. Meanwhile the Russian and Belgian authorities encourage the circulation of alarmist rumours about the mortality from Indian plague in Seistan, the doctor at the Russian legation in Teheran recently having spread a statement that 99 per cent. of deaths from plague had occurred in the Naizar district of Seistan. While these reports are very greatly exaggerated in respect of Indian plague, an epidemic of this disease nevertheless ravaged Seistan during the spring of 1906. At Nasratabad the population was reduced through it from 2500 to rather more than 300. The efforts of Dr. Kelly, the medical officer attached to the British Consulate in Nasratabad, however, did much to arrest it, over 500 inoculations having been made and an excellent impression created by the recovery of a man who had been seized after being inoculated by him. None-the-less, its existence prepares the way for more vigorous precautions against Indian caravans, the measures of the plague officials being directed against the development of Indian commercial relations with Northern Persia and Northern Afghanistan in the hope that Persian and Afghan merchants may frequent the Meshed emporium. At the present moment these preventive measures have achieved conspicuous success, and Russian commercial activity has entirely subjugated Khorassan province. No headway appears to be possible for British trade; while the rapid growth of Russian commercial influence, under this system of pernicious assistance, threatens to reduce Seistan to the position of a commercial base from which the markets of India can be attacked by articles of Russian manufacture. A precisely similar state of things prevails at Meshed in respect of Afghanistan. [Illustration: DÂK BUNGALOW ON THE NUSHKI ROUTE]