portion consisted of the valleys and plains among the mountains and
along their skirts, together with certain favored spots upon the banks
of streams in the flat regions. These flat regions themselves were
traversed in many places by rocky ridges of a singularly forbidding
aspect. The whole appearance of the country was dry, stony, sterile. As
a modern writer observes, "the livery of the land is constantly brown
or gray; water is scanty; plains and mountains are equally destitute of
wood. When the traveller, after toiling over the rocky mountains that
separate the plains looks down from the pass he has won with toil
and difficulty upon the country below, his eye wanders unchecked and
unrested over an uniform brown expanse losing itself in distance."

Still this character, though predominant, is not universal. Wherever
there is water, vegetation springs up. The whole of the mountain region
is intersected by valleys and plains which are more or less fertile.
The line of country between Bebahan and Shiraz is for above sixty miles
"covered with wood and verdure," in East of Shiraz, on the route between
that city and Kerman the country is said to be in parts "picturesque and
romantic," consisting of "low luxuriant valleys or; plains separated
by ranges of low mountains, green to their very summits with beautiful
turf." The plains of Khubbes, Merdasht, Ujan, Shiraz, Kazerun,
and others, produce abundantly under a very inefficient system of
cultivation. Even in the most arid tracts there is generally a time of
greenness immediately after the spring rains, when the whole country
smiles with verdure.

It has been already remarked that the Empire, which, commencing from
Persia Proper, spread itself towards the close of the sixth century
before Christ, over the surrounding tracts, included a number of
countries not yet described in these volumes, since they formed no part