Our way lay over a black cotton-soil plain, and the road looked as if it had recently been furrowed by a giant plough. It was hard going for the Ford cars, and our difficulties were increased when rain presently overtook us. Half an hour's downpour will convert any Persian road into a morass, and that between Surkhidizeh and Kirind is no exception to the rule. The Fords for once were baffled. The leading car could get no grip on the slippery soil; its front wheels revolved aimlessly, then by a mighty exertion moved forward a few yards, only to come to an abrupt stop, up to its front axle in a slimy {83} mud-hole. We temporarily jettisoned everything, and pulled it out with a tow rope and the united efforts of a dozen friendly natives who were not averse from a little physical labour for a pecuniary reward. There was no getting rid of the glutinous mud. It adhered to one's boots and clung to one's garments with a persistency that was irritating and ruinous to the temper. The fifteen miles' journey occupied four hours, and we were "bogged" seven times before the cars finally got clear and gained the roughly paved causeway which, skirting Kirind village, led to the British military post. [Illustration: TYPICAL PERSIAN VILLAGE.] Kirind itself is a straggling and typical group of Persian mud-houses. It clings haphazardly to both sides of a steep, narrow gorge, closed at one end by a perpendicular wall of jagged limestone rock, which rises sheer for a thousand feet. Beneath this frowning rock-barrier nestles a village abominably and indescribably filthy, inhabitated by an elf-like people in whom months of semi-starvation had bred something of the sullen ferocity of a pack of famishing wolves. There was in their eyes the glint of the hunted wild animal. They fled at our approach--men, women, and children--diving into dark, noisome, underground dens which exhaled a horrible effluvium, or else bolting like so many scared wild-cats for some lair high up amongst the limestone ridges. Some of the fugitives whom we rounded up and spoke to compassionately answered with a terrified snarl, as if dreading we should do them injury. Yet it {84} was chiefly the Turk, that zealous propagandist of the tenets of Islam, whose rapacity and cruelty had driven this fellow Moslem race to the borderland of primitive savagery.