The Kara Koum is formed of low sandy hills which the high winds are
constantly shifting and forming. These "barkans," as the Russians call
them, vary in height from thirty to ninety feet. They expose a wide
surface to the northern hurricanes which drive them gradually
southward. And on this account there is a well-justified fear for the
safety of the Transcaspian. It had to be protected in some efficacious
way, and General Annenkof would have been much embarrassed if provident
Nature had not, at the same time as she gave the land favorable for the
railway to be laid along, given the means of stopping the shifting of
the barkanes.

Behind these sand hills grow a number of spring shrubs, clumps of
tamarisk, star thistles, and that _Haloxylon ammodendron_ which
Russians call, not so scientifically, "saksaoul." Its deep, strong
roots are as well adapted for binding together the ground as those of
_Hippophaë rhamnoides_, an arbutus of the Eleagnaceous family, which is
used for binding together the sands in southern Europe.

To these plantations of saksaouls the engineers of the line have added
in different places a series of slopes of worked clay, and in the most
dangerous places a line of palisades.

These precautions are doubtless of use; but if the road is protected,
the passengers are hardly so, when the sand flies like a bullet hail,
and the wind sweeps up from the plain the whitish efflorescences of
salt. It is a good thing for us that we are not in the height of the
hot season; and it is not in June or July or August that I would advise
you to take a trip on the Grand Transasiatic.

I am sorry that Major Noltitz does not think of coming out on the