BALUCHISTAN

43

from which, to north and south, the hydrographical system
of the country spreads outwards. Southwards we pass
by gentle gradients through the long narrow valleys
(which extend perchance for hundreds of miles, bounded
on either hand by level-topped mountain ridges without
an apparent break in their flat brown sides), either to
Las Bela and the sandy flats of the Purali delta, or to
the palm-fringed valleys of Makridn and Mashkhel. If
we move directly west we shall be landed in the wide
spaces of the Kharan desert with Seistin on the western
horizon. The desert of Kharan, and the yet wider wastes
which are peopled by nomadic Baluch tribes between
Kharan and the Helmund, have upon closer acquaintance
proved to be infinitely less hostile to traffic than was
supposed some years ago. A great central space of the
desert is occupied by mountains, rough, jagged, and sunscorched
 in appearance, but which, nevertheless, give rise to
a fringe of fresh-water springs at the foot of their shelving
slopes, about the clefts and edges of which vegetation is
Occasionally abundant. A trade route between Seistan
and Quetta, passing through this desert space and touching
these mountains, was not unknown to the medizeval Arab
occupants of Baluchistan, and it has lately been re-opened
to frontier trade. A marked geographical feature of the
Kharan desert is the great swamp, or lagoon, which, under
the name of the Mashkhel Hamun, absorbs the drainage
of an enormous area of Southern Afghanistan and Eastern
Persia of which the hydrography is unconnected with
the sea. The sea-board sill or fringe of Persia and
Baluchistan which contributes water to the Gulf or to the
Arabian Sea is exceedingly narrow—perhaps less, on an
average, than 200 miles in width. There is, in fact, no
river of any importance draining into the sea between
the Indus and the Euphrates.
The coast province of Makran has played so important
 a part in the early histories of Indian occupation,
and is still so intimately associated with frontier political
problems, that a short reference to the peculiarities of its
geographical conformation becomes necessary. Like the