The Geographical Journal (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society): Volume IX, No. 4 [‎209r] (88/172)

THE SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS OF AFGHANISTAN. 405
Somehow one generally connects the word “ desert ” with a flat level
country, hut it is obviously wrong to suppose that a desert consists
of only plains. From Nushki to Chagai we do find a vast level plain,
and a plain, moreover, of alluvial soil. You will see that all the
drainage from the mountainous country to the east of it, as far as Quetta
and Peshin, flows out into this plain by the Lora and other rivers, and
that these rivers find their terminus in the Lora Hamun. In flood
time this Hamun is a wide sheet of shallow water, but it soon evaporates,
and for most part of the year is like it was when we saw it, a large
sheet of dry salt. In old days this whole plain, including all the flat
Shorawak plain, must have been a huge lake, to account for all this
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MARCHING IN SANDHILLS.
vast expanse of level alluvial soil. All along the north of it stietches
the wide sand desert called Registan, a vast sea of billows and billows
of sand upwards of 200 feet high, which is slowly but surely advancing
year by year, and burying the flat alluvial plains south and east of them.
This wilderness of sand stretches northwards as far as the Helmand.
You find on the level plains stunted shrubs of sorts, and all over
the sandy portions abundance of a species of tamarisk known as the
white tamarisk, and called by the natives taghaz. It grows to some
size, but always looks a bleak, starving, neglected sort of tiee. It
assumes a weird and ghost-like appearance in the moonlight, and some
how always seems to impress a sad, mute protest at the how ling sandy
wilderness around it.