'The lands of the Eastern Caliphate Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem conquest to the time of Timur' [‎323] (364/586)

CHAP. XXIII] THE GREAT DESERT AND MAKR A N. 323
district of Yazd (originally counted as part of Fars) and by
Kirman, south of which it spread out among the ranges of the
Makran coast. To the east and north-east lay Khurasan with
its dependent and adjacent provinces; namely Ktimis to the north
of the Desert, and next a corner of Khurasan proper; then
Kuhistan, and below this Sijistan at the narrow part opposite
Kirman, Sijistan being coterminous with what is now known as
the Baluchistan desert, which in the middle-ages was considered
as a part of Makran.
Both Ibn Hawkal and Mukaddasi write of the Desert from
personal experience, for each had crossed its wastes on more than
one occasion. Ibn Hawkal briefly describes it as a No Man's
Land, belonging to no province, where robbers from every district
found shelter, and where permanent villages, except in three in
stances, were conspicuously absent. Mukaddasi enters into the
matter in some detail, and of his remarks the following is a
summary :—The Desert was, he writes, like the sea, for you could
cross it in almost any direction, if you could keep a true line, and
pick up the tanks and domes, built above the water-pits, which in
the 4th (10th) century were carefully maintained along the main
tracks at distances of a day's march. He, Mukaddasi, had once
been 70 days on the passage across, and he speaks from experience
of the countless steep passes over the ever-barring ranges of hills,
the fearful descents, the dangerous salt swamps (sabkhah), the
alternate heat and bitter cold. He notices too that there was
but little sand, and there were palm-trees and some arable lands
hidden away in many of the minor valleys.
At that date the Desert was terrorised by roving bands of the
Bahis (Baluchi tribesmen), whose fastnesses were in the Kufs
mountatnT^ThiT^rifliiaii border, k a"people with savage faces,
evil hearts, and neither morals nor manners.' None could escape
meeting them, and those they overcame they would stone to
death ' as one would a snake, putting a man's head on a boulder,
and beating upon it, till it be crushed in'; and when Mukaddasi
enquired why they so barbarously put men to death he was
answered that it was in order not needlessly to blunt their swords.
'Adud-ad-Dawlah the Buyid, in Mukaddasi's day, had in part
curbed these BaWch brigands, by carrying off a tribe of them to