Hardly less strange is the land formation of this southern edge of Baluchistan. It is an old, old country, replete with the evidences of unwritten history, the ultimate bourne of much of the flotsam and jetsam of Asiatic humanity; a cul-de-sac where northern intruders meet and get no farther. Yet geologically it is very new--so new that one might think that the piles of sea-born shells which are to be found here and there drifted into heaps on the soft mud flats amongst the bristling ridges, were things of yesterday; so new, in fact, that it has not yet done changing its outline. There is little difficulty in marking the changes in the coast-line which must have occurred since the third century B.C. One may even count up the island formations and disappearances which have occurred within a generation; so incomplete that the changing conditions of its water-supply have left their marks everywhere over it. Desiccated forests are to be found with the trees still standing, as they will continue to stand in this dry climate for centuries. Huge masonry constructions, built as dams for the retention of water in the inland hills, testify to the existence of an abundant water-supply within historic periods; as also do the terraced slopes which reach down in orderly steps to the foot of the ridges, each step representing a formerly irrigated field. The water has failed; whether, as is most probable, from the same desiccating processes which are drying up lakes and dwindling glaciers in both northern and southern hemispheres, or whether there has been special interference with the routine of Nature and man has contributed to his own undoing, it is impossible at present to say, but the result is that Makran is now, and has been for centuries, a forgotten and almost a forsaken country. In order to understand the remarkable peculiarity of its geographical formation one requires a good map. Ridges, rather than ranges, are the predominant feature of its orography. Ridges of all degrees of altitude, extension, and rockiness, running in long lines of parallel flexure on a system of curves which sweeps them round gradually from the run of Indus frontier hills to an east and west strike through Makran, and a final trend to the north-west, where they guard the Persian coasts of the Gulf. As a rule they throw off no spurs, standing stiff, jagged, naked, and uncompromising, like the parallel walls of some gigantic system of defences, and varying in height above the plain from 5000 feet to 50. The higher ranges have been scored by weather and wet, with deep gorges and drainage lines, and their scarred sides present various degrees of angle and declivity, according to the dip of the strata that forms them. Some of the smaller ridges have their rocky backbone set up straight, forming a knife-like edge along which nothing but a squirrel could run. Across them, breaking through the axis almost at right angles run some of the