Reeds and rushes grow in abundance along the flat shores of the Hamun, but no trees. The natives build their huts of reeds, and also a curious kind of boat. Handfuls of dry, yellow reeds of last year's growth are tied together into cigar-shaped bundles, and then a number of such bundles are bound together into a torpedo-like vessel several yards long. When laden this reed boat floats barely four inches above the water, but it can never be filled and made to sink by the waves. It is true that the bundles of reeds might be loosened and torn apart by a high sea, but the natives take good care not to go out in bad weather. It took fourteen of these reed boats to accommodate our party and its belongings. A half-naked Persian stood at the stern of each boat and pushed the vessel along by means of a long pole, for the lake though twelve miles broad is only five or six feet deep. A fresh breeze skimmed the surface when we came out of the reeds into the open lake, and it was very refreshing after weeks of the dry oppressive heat of the desert. [Illustration: MAP SHOWING JOURNEY FROM TEHERAN TO BALUCHISTAN (pp. 46-54 and 72-81).] After crossing the Hamun we had not more than a couple of hours' ride to the capital of Seistan, Nasretabad. Five months before us another guest had arrived, the plague; and just at the time the black angel of death was going about in search of victims. He took the peasant from the plough and the shepherd from his flock; and the fisherman, who in the morning had gone cheerily to set his nets in the waters of the Hamun, in the evening lay groaning in his hut with a burning fever. Asia is the birth-place of the ruling peoples, the Aryans, and of the yellow race; it is the cradle of the great religions, Buddhism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism; and it is also the breeding-place of fearful epidemic diseases which from time to time sweep over mankind like devastating waves. Among these is the "Black Death," the plague which in the year 1350 carried off twenty-five millions of the people of Europe. Men thought that it was a divine punishment. Some repented and did penance; others gave themselves up to drunkenness and other excesses. They had then no notion of the deadly bacteria, and of the serum which renders the blood immune from their attacks. In 1894 a similar wave swept from China through Hong Kong to India, where three millions of human beings died in a few years. I remember a small house in the poor quarter of Bombay which I visited in 1902. The authorities had given orders that when any one died of the plague a red cross should be painted beside the doorpost of the house. And this small house alone had forty crosses.