PERSIA

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 85, 30 September 1911, Page 2 (Supplement)

PERSIA

A LAND OF MYSTERY. The building of a railroad by the British from Persia to Karachi .across Mekran may not of itself be a project of importance. Europe lias offered Jittlo opposition, and engineers say the route presents few serious obstacles; but it brings the rest of the world into eontact with some of the earliest scenes of Eastern history and opens a land of mystery of which there have been only glimpses about every thousand years. Mekran is the coastal region of Baluchistan and extends from India to the Persian Gulf. Sailors- before and since the voyage of Alexander's admiral, Nearelms, have coasted along its white shores and found themselves surrounded by spouting whalers such as the first mapmakers delighted to picture. High-poop-ed native crafts like ancient galleys carrying pirate slave traders and gunrunners dodge into the shallow harbors. British steamships sometimes stop at one of its ports for a cargo of dates or rice for the Indian trade. But sailors never penetrate into the range of yellow bills or across the sterile plain, "the hottest laud of all Asia," where the sand rolls in waves and floats in stilling clouds. Oases are rare along the streams that flow from these ridges; the country is dry, weather worn, desolate, shunned by man. The few inhabitants are the flotsam and jetsam of the civilisations that have passed over it. They are the wreckage that drifted into this obscure world from the earliest movements into and from India to the first search of Europe for Eastern empires. The Portuguese that

coiHlih'ii'tl Muscat niul cajiMirml the islands of Oriuuz and Kislim and founded colonies at Bander Abbas .and Gwadur left their tribute of adveiitures, as did the Dutch, French and English thai caiiie after them. These fcwid., here, older people of v nose o"- o 'in all : trace was lost, colonics of bali-bred Arabs left by the decline of tne Arab at Sind, Mongols from the time of Gerigffiz Khan, negroes descended from mediaeval slaves, and stragglers from every central Asian tribe. IM^' Yet Mekran cannot alv,..;s'have been such a dry, desolate land. Burieu in the sands beneath some of the little towns are the ruins of cities. At one place an explorer found the walls of six towns that must at some time have been plates of importance. In the hills above Gwadur are the remains of a great reservoir. Tombs with fragments of pottery that no one seerns able to identify are often uncovered; many of the hills are closely covered with stone houses with dome-shaped interiors. There are remains of works of masonry that were great dams for catching the waters of the river at Hood time. In arid deserts explorers have found forests of dead trees that have stood stark for centuries, and 011 some of the hills terraces that must some time have been in a high state of cultivation. No one apparently is able to tell who built these cities and reservoirs, cultivated the terraced hills, or were buried in the tombs. The very reason why this land to-day is only a region of great heat, thirst and death is one of the secrets of Nature.

History gives but brief glimpses of this mysterious land. Cyrus is said to have crossed Mekran in invading India. It was the scene of Alexander's memorise retreat. Part of his troops followed the coast and suffered greatly from heat and privation, another part took a more northerly route and fared better, and a third detachment sailed along the coast in ships that Nearchus had built on the Indus. The route of this march has been traced, and from the Grecian story one can identify every cape and harbor as if it were written to-day. We know nothing more of Mekran until the Arabs conquered the lower Indus, more than a thousand years after Alexander's time. Then it was that caravans passed over the country bearing the goods of India to Bagdad and the West, and that there were oases and cities all the way. But the Arabs' power declined, and again Mekran was in darkness. The empire-searching fleets of Europe stopped on its shore, but never entered the uninviting land. Then adventurous Englishmen carried the telegraph line, that came up from the sea at Jask, over the desert to Karachi, and recently Admiral Slade's men have penetrated it in their hunt for gun-runners. From these brief glimpses it is evident that the desolation and emutiness of Mekran are only a present condition, and that the proposed British road is but the line of the ancient caravan route from the East to the West, the way of commerce of Asia before it took to the sea. Its mysteries may remain unsolved, but in view of the present strife fo land in the Middle East the obscurity of Ifekran is ended.