The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 2 (of 2): By His Wife, Isabel BurtonBurton, Isabel, Lady
History
The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, volume 2 (of 2): By His Wife, Isabel Burton
Burton, Isabel, Lady
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821-1890; Explorers -- Great Britain -- Biography; Scholars -- Great Britain -- Biography
In the afternoon they became brightly red,
As the date when it falls from the tree;
Before the sun set they were ripe.
From each bough the bunches hung
Cool as water in a cavern,
Sweet as the sugar[8] in Paradise,
Fit for prophets and martyrs to eat.
Then said Bári, 'Thou seest Allah's might,
How he can feed His children in the waste!
Fruits grow upon the (withered) stump,
Waters flow from the rugged rock,
All things obey the Lord of all;
It is (only) man that doubts and disbelieves.'
As it happened unto him,
So, by my head! may it happen to me.
Such is the tale of the Dervish;[9]
Gentles, my song is done."
Leaving Unarpúr, we pass out of the Unhappy Valley into Sindia Felix,
beginning at Gopang, Májhand, Sann, and Amiri, and here in 1876 rails
have been laid and trollies were working. Thence we go to Lakkí,
where he composed the poem on the "Legends of the Lakkí Hills," given
above, and then to Séhwan. The road was a precipitous _corniche_, very
narrow, with camels marching in Indian file. Séhwan is an important
military and religious place, commanding the passage of the Indus,
but intensely hot, with deleterious and deadly climate. This was the
place where Richard in old days buried an old Athenæum sauce-pot, which
he had painted like an Etruscan vase. He treated it with fire and
acid, smashed it, and buried it in the ground, and took in a lot of
antiquaries, who never forgave him; and when he was travelling in the
land of the Turanian Brahúis, he drew up a grammar and a vocabulary,
with barbaric terminations, and the Presidency rang for nine days with
the wondrous discovery. That was in his boyhood, and he writes, "I
_now_ repent me in sackcloth and ashes, and my trembling hand indites
'_Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa_.'"
We then go along the Aral stream for two days to Lake Manchar, and
visit the Kirthár Mountains, with their two sanitaria, Char Yaru
and the Danna Towers. Then to Lárkána, an Eastern influent of the
Indus--eight stages. Lárkána is the centre of Sindia Felix. We go
to Sakhar, to Bakar, and lastly to Rohri, and then make our way to
Shikárpúr across a kind of desert, south of the Bolan Pass, and which
is the main _entrepôt_ of the Khorasán and Central Asian caravan trade
with Sind and Western India, where, as usual, he visited everything and
found the usual changes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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