Now the dromedaries are urged on to the uttermost; they have double loads to carry, but they travel as quickly as they came. The kidnapped children cease to cry, and fall asleep with weariness and the violent swaying motion. The party rides all night and all the next day without stopping, and the robbers often look round to see if they are pursued. They rest for the first time at the salt spring, posting a look-out on an adjacent mound. They eat and drink without losing a minute, and get ready for the rest of the ride. The captives are paralysed with fright; the young women are half choked with weeping, and a little lad in a tattered shirt goes about crying vainly for his mother. The eyes of the captives are blindfolded with white bandages that they may not notice the way they are travelling and try later to escape back to Bam. Then the headlong ride is resumed, and after eight days the troop of riders is back at home with their booty, but without their chief. Innumerable raids of this kind have scourged eastern Persia, and in the same way Turkomans have devastated Khorasan in the north-east. On the eastern frontier it is the Kurds who are the robbers. In this disturbed frontier region there is not a town without its small primitive mud fort or outlook tower. SCORPIONS On running dromedaries we now ride on eastwards through northern Baluchistan. Dry, burnt-up desert tracts, scantily clothed with thistles and shrubs, moving dunes of fine yellow sand, low hill ridges disintegrated by alternate heat and cold--such is the country where a few nomads wander about with their flocks, and the stranger often wonders how the animals find a living. In certain valleys, however, there is pasture and also water, and sometimes belts of thriving tamarisks are passed, and bushes of saxaul with green leafy branches, hard wood, and roots which penetrate down to the moisture beneath the surface. The great caravan road we are following is, however, exceedingly desolate. Only at the stations is water to be found, and even that is brackish; but the worst trial is the heat, which now, at the end of April, becomes more oppressive every day. The temperature rises nearly up to 105-1/2 deg. in the shade, and to ride full in the face of the sun is like thrusting one's head into a blazing furnace. When there is a wind we are all right, and the sand whirls like yellow ghosts over the heated ground. But when the air is calm the outlines of the hills seem to quiver in the heat, and the barrel of a gun which has been out in the sun blisters the hands on being touched. In the height of the summer the Baluchis wrap strips of felt round their stirrup-irons to protect the dromedaries from burns on the flanks.