The rough roofing of the bazaar forms a grateful shelter from the scorching sun. The shops are similar to those of Kabul. After the bazaar come winding streets among the houses. Space here is not so limited as in Kabul, and though the streets are no wider, the houses are less lofty. In style they differ much from the Kabul houses; generally, the rooms are square, eight or nine feet high, with a domed brickwork roof. One, two, or more rooms, side by side, for master, servants, and horses, constitute the house. Often there are no windows, light being admitted through the door and through an aperture in the centre of the domed roof. This last acts also, when a wood fire is lighted, as a convenient chimney. The sandali, however, is generally used in the winter. The houses stand in an enclosed yard or garden, but since the domed roofs of the houses are not used for the promenade as are those of Kabul, the garden-walls have no need to be more than seven or eight feet high. This style of house is peculiar to Turkestan, though there are, in the suburbs of Mazar, many houses precisely like those of Kabul. The walls, built of sun-dried bricks and coated with mud, become painfully white and glaring in the summer sun. We reached one of the gates of the town and rode out. Here, in the suburbs, are the summer gardens of the richer men. Far away are the mountains, blue in the distance. Mazar lies on a malarious, almost desert plain in Turkestan, nine miles east of the ancient city Balkh, and thirty miles south of the Pata Kesar ferry, on the Oxus river, so that we were near the Russian frontier. The plain is desert, because of the absence of water. When the snow melts in the warmth of the spring, the plain becomes a blaze of red flowers, wild tulips--poppies, my Interpreter said: but these shrivel up and die in the summer. The gardens of the town, and the fields immediately around it, are irrigated by an artificial canal, made, I was told, by the Amîr’s father during the few months he reigned. They said the water was brought south from the Oxus, but I fancy it must come from the mountains towards Malmul. The hospital, a short distance out of the town, was once the suburban house and garden of a wealthy man. The patients lay in the garden: some were under the trees, others were protected by long thatched roofs supported on poles. None were in the house. In Tash Kurghán the patients with festering wounds were shut in a house when they should have been out in the open. Here they were out in the open, lying on the earth, and dying by scores from malarial fever. They should have been in the house, which was cool, and raised four or five feet above the earth.