Immense plains of sand, with a bare and brackish surface, called _Bejaban_, traverse the whole of Persia, from the Caspian Sea to the Indus. They comprise the Deserts of Kerusan, Seistan, Beloochistan, and Mekran, rich in salts with a basis of soda. "The coasts of the Persian Gulf," as Mrs. Somerville remarks, "are burning hot sandy solitudes, so completely barren, that the country from Bassora to the Indus, a distance of 1200 miles, is nearly a sterile waste. Three-tenths of Persia is a desert, and the tableland is nearly a wide scene of desolation. A great salt-desert occupies 27,000 square miles between Irak and Khorasan, of which the soil is a stiff clay, covered with efflorescence of common salt and nitre, often an inch thick, varied only by a few saline plants and patches of verdure in the hollows. This dreary waste joins the large sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman. Khelat, the capital of Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the sea; round it there is cultivation, but the greater part of that country is a lifeless plain, over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the north wind into ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet high, without a vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose hot and pestilential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these dismal sands impassable at certain seasons." The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the Indus. That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, is more than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes that the actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern landscapes which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those provinces where the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, the scene would hardly remind the traveller of "That delightful province of the Sun. The first of Persian lands he shines upon, Where all the loveliest children of his beam. Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream."[43]