'The Middle Eastern question or some political problems of Indian defence' [‎107v] (219/616)

160 THE HIGHLAND TRIBESMEN OF PERSIA
occasional villages clustered round a few wells of more
or less brackish water. For in the rare patches of
cultivation the summer crops have long since been
garnered, and the grass has everywhere been eaten
down to the ground by the roaming herds and flocks.
Yet it only requires a few days' beneficent rain to con
vert this plain into a great succulent pasture land, and
as the first autumnal storms had just swept up from the
Gulf, we found, before we reached Ahwaz, tender
shoots of green already bursting forth from the sodden
soil under the compelling force of the fierce sunshine,
and we met troops of Arabs—men, women, and chil
dren—sallying forth from the villages on the banks of
the Karun to sow their winter crops and pick out fresh
pasturages in their accustomed haunts. A little later
in the year the Bakhtiaris descend from their mountains
to share the plain with the Arabs, but they had not yet
reached the lowlands, and we seemed to have dropped
suddenly into a purely Arab country. The harsh
guttural tongue, always voluble and strident, the strong
Semitic type, even the coif of yellow silk, bound round
the head with a twist of black camel-hair wool, showed
that, though still nominally in Persia, we had already
passed into the land of the Arab, where the untutored
son of Ishmael still roams at large, yielding, outside
the towns, but scant allegiance to any master, Turk or
Persian, from the shores of the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. to the out
skirts of Damascus and Aleppo.