collected and covered over even the faintest vestige of vegetable life. [Illustration: HUJJATABAD, THE FIRST STAGE FROM YEZD. Sandy desert, with qan’at pits in foreground.] The typical Persian plain is very long, appearing to be comparatively narrow, and certainly flat beyond conception. The plains through which one approaches Yezd from Kashan or Kirman are probably on the average about sixty miles broad. But the huge barren mountains, lying in long jagged ranges to the right and left, show with such plainness of detail from every point, that the traveller unused to the clear atmosphere of the East can hardly credit the full size and distance. Mountains, plains, foreground, and far perspective, everything, in the Yezd district at any rate, is one neutral tint of brown, except for the snow lying on the rocks of the mountain-top, the long flakes of salt scattered here and there about the plain, or the continual moving mirage. Even at sunrise and sunset, when the sky and distant hills put on a colouring of glorious brilliancy, there is an utter absence of those soft tones in the foreground which can only be given by sunlight in a humid atmosphere. Near Yezd there rise into sight brown villages, excrescences of the same material as that on which they stand, isolated separate objects with sharp definite bounds. The scanty, hedgeless crops that surround them, usually arranged in oblong patches like small allotments, seldom show until the traveller is quite near; the few trees are wretchedly poor in size and colour, and the walls and buildings are simply mud, of which three parts are in ruins. After a few of these villages we come to Yezd itself, equally isolated from everything, and in other respects very much the same as the villages. However, as we approach the town by most of the main roads, there are no fields and no trees at all. Also there are sticking out from the town a lot of high square air-shafts, looking like short factory chimneys. Yezd, like the villages, is brown, but there are a few patches of white. There are one or two very faintly tiled minarets and a newer-looking green dome; but these things are not sufficiently striking to modify the general brown effect.