The terrible extent to which the most exposed provinces suffer from these excursions is explained by the courage and resolution of the Turkomans. No war, no devastation caused by the elements, can be compared to the misery which their depredations occasion. Not only is all trade and commerce on the highways crippled, but even the husbandman must provide himself with a tower in which he can take refuge, when suddenly attacked by them during his labours in the fields. The smallest village is surrounded by a wall. Even these measures do not suffice, for the robbers often come in large bands and lay siege to such fortified places, and not seldom carry the whole population, men, women, and children, into captivity with all their moveable property. I have seen in Eastern Khorassan villages whose inhabitants, although in the immediate vicinity of large forests, pass the winter without fires, because none dare venture out to cut wood beyond the walls. Others suffer hunger, as their water-mills are outside the village. Travelling is, of course, regarded as a most desperate venture, which no one undertakes save in cases of the most urgent necessity, or under the protection of an armed force. The readers of my book on Central Asia will have already formed some idea how far this fear of captivity among the Turkomans is well-founded. The lot of the negro, confined in the close hold of a ship during his passage from Africa to America, is sufficiently hard, yet it is not less hard to be bound behind the saddle of a nomad with the feet tied under the belly of the horse, to be insufficiently supplied with food and water, and to be thus transported for days across the weary desert, far from one's dear country and the bosom of one's family. These privations of savage life in the tent of the rude nomad and under an inclement sky are the harder for the Persian to bear, as at home he is accustomed to cooked food and the comforts of civilised life. In addition to these sufferings he is loaded with heavy chains, which are not removed by night or by day. He is continually the object of the revilings, curses, and blows of his tyrannical master. Indeed the first stage of his slavery is the most grievous.