The Geographical Journal (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society): Volume IX, No. 4 [‎211v] (93/172)

410
THE SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS OF AFGHANISTAN.
nearly all night with incompetent guides, found ourselves at daylight
near a place we thought we had passed early the e , \ cning before. A\ e
did not reach water till the afternoon, and did not get to our intended
halting-place till the second morning. Such are the delights of night
marching in unknown country. With a long straggling line of men
and transport animals like ours, many precautions had, of course, to be
taken to prevent those behind losing their way. Beacon fires used to
be lit wherever fuel was available on the march, and a strong rear-guard
formed to see that no men or animals were left behind on the road. No
amount of severity sufficed to prevent men falling down asleep on the
road. Fatigue and drowsiness obliterated all thought of punishment
and all fear of the fate that this inhospitable country metes out to lost
stragglers.
The thing which strikes one most in travelling in a desert, whether
it be by day or night, is its awful stillness and solitude. Not a
sound is to be heard, except now and then the rustling of the wind
over the sand. Not a living creature, man or beast, is to be seen day
after day. Here and there, after miles and miles of trackless sand,
you come upon the footmarks of a herd of deer or a herd of wild asses,
but you seldom see those animals themselves. Snakes and lizards, it is
true, you see everywhere, and a more snaky country than this is in the
hot weather, it is hard to imagine. There was one sound, however, that
did sometimes break the dead stillness of a night march, and that in an
unpleasant manner—that was the deep hiss of the horned viper. This
pleasing reptile, of which we came across many, lies during the day
with only its head showing above the sand, and it is almost impossible
to distinguish it from the sand. At night, however, it used to sit up
and hiss loudly whenever any one approached it. If we had a lantern
handy, or could set fire to a bush to enable us to find the beast, we used
to dismount and kill it; but at other times we all used to make a wide
detour, and leave it hissing a proud defiance at us as we passed away
in the distance.
Some of our party had very narrow escapes from venomous snakes,
but fortunately we had no casualties from that cause. One night I
saw a venomous snake, an Echis carinatd, actually strike one of my men
on the hand as he was pulling up a small bush to throw on a beacon
fire. Luckily, the shot was a bad one, for the snake’s head glanced off
his hand sideways without the fangs piercing the man’s skin. On
another occasion, one early morning a very fine specimen of the same
viper came out of a small hole in the ground over which I had just been
sleeping. A few minutes betore he might have caught me napping,
but as it was he got up too late, and went to join our zoological
collection. We generally looked for a clear spot to lie down and sleep
on, but as often as not we were too sleepy and tired on our night
marches to bother much about it. One night, as he threw himself