'Report of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Edward Stewart, Bengal Staff Corps, on Special Duty on the Perso-Afghan Frontier.' [‎124r] (3/80)

desert without food or water for man or beast. The mules and horses were turned
out in the waste, to pick up anything they could. Early the next morning I was up,
and the guide at last discerned the hamlet of Do Ohah, some three miles from where
we had passed the night, and I was delighted to get food and water for the men and
animals.
On the 5th November I made another long march of 29 miles to Gebur, leaving the
small town of Biarjamand about seven miles on my left. Gebur is about nine miles
beyond Biarjamand. In passing I saw the town of Biarjamand, and took the bearings
ot it from the road. It is a poor little place, and Gebur is a far more flourishing
village. Biarjamand, however, is a sort of capital for this part of the desert country,
and the deputy of the Governor of Shahrud lives there. Gebur is a prosperous place
of about 1,200 inhabitants. It consists of three villages known as Dhazian, Gebur,
and Kalabalah. About a mile off is another village called Khana Khudi, which is
celebrated for its good tobacco. All the country that I passed over after I left
Husainabad, until I reached Biarjamand, or a distance of 85 miles, had no permanent
inhabitants except a single family at Do Chah. At this season, however, every brackish
little spring, of which there are several, has many flocks of sheep and goats depending
on it for water. There is fairly good browzing on the desert shrubs, and the flocks
which ordinarily graze in the Alburg mountains are now driven down to this edge of
the desert so as to avoid the snow in the mountains, but in summer this country is
quite deserted, and the heat is then, I hear, very great. Though it was the month of
November, the sun had great power, and scorched the skin off my face, a thing that
had rarely happened to me, even in the hot weather in India. The nights, however,
were intensely cold. Biarjamand itself has about 1,200 inhabitants, and, with the
group of villages depending on it, of which this place Gebur is one, is said to have
about 4,000 inhabitants. At Gebur there are some ruins, but not of any great extent.
They appear, however, to be very ancient. Many curiosities are found here, but they
are difficult to procure, the people standing in great dread of the Government, and the
regulations as to treasure-trove being very severe. I, however, procured a small
ornament for hanging round a woman’s neck, with an inscription in a character
unknown to me, but which is neither Cufic nor Pehlevi. The whole country that I
passed over after entering the desert seemed rich in copper. I constantly passed the
slag of copper furnaces, and my guide told me that he knew of at least one thousand
places where copper smelting furnaces had formerly existed. Now, however, the
mines were not worked, they having been declared a royal monopoly. The King
himself did not work them, and allowed no one else to do so, except in two or three
places. I passed what appeared to be a very rich ore of copper. Copper could be
produced in almost unlimited quantities in Khurasan, but under present circumstances
it does not pay very well to produce it. As smelted in Persia, it is too impure to be
rolled out very thin, and can only be used for trays and such articles as can be made
moderately thick. Large quantities of sheet copper are imported into Persia from
England, and some from Russia, for the purpose of making cooking pots, as these can
not be made from the native copper. If a railway were constructed from Khurasan,
either to the Caspian Sea or to the Persian Gulf The historical term used to describe the body of water between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. ; large quantities of copper would
probably be exported, but it does not pay to carry impure copper by camels or mules
to the sea, and there is also a scarcity of wood for smelting. If railways existed coal
could be brought from the mines between Tehran and Kasvin, from which the former
place is at present supplied.
About 20 miles from my camp at Khargosi I saw a range of mountains called Kuh
Zir. In these hills I was told that there are many abandoned workings for gold, and on
my journey from the Caspian to Tehran I travelled with a Lieutenant-Colonel of
Persian Engineers called Sulyman Khan, who had been sent by the Shah to inspect
and report upon these abandoned workings for gold in the Kuh Zir. He had spent
some time there, but his report must have been unfavourable, for nothing was done to
reopen them. My informant at Kharghosi said that though gold could be procured by
digging, it was a losing speculation. I know r of three places in Persia where gold ha^t
been worked in ancient times, one at Kavend, near Zenjan, which I visited in 1880,
the second near Mashad, of which I shall speak later, and the third is this place called
Kuh Zir. I halted two days at Gebur, as my horses and mules were knocked up by
the long marches I had been making. The country through which I had been passing
is quite unsurveyed, a line across the desert with a few names ol places being all that
any map shows. No mountains are shown, though there are several ranges of con
siderable elevation.