Large stones accurately laid out in circles of eighteen or twenty feet in diameter were also met with at intervals of every two miles or so by the side of the track, and this very often in districts where nothing was visible but a boundless waste of loose, drifting sand.

Our Baluchis could not or would not explain the _raison d'etre_ of them, though the stones must, in many instances, have been brought great distances and for a definite purpose.

I could not, however, get any explanation regarding them at either Kelat or Quetta.
With the exception of the Lakh Pass leading over a chain of hills about eighteen miles due west of Beila, the road to Noundra was as flat as a billiard-table.

The crossing of the Lakh, however, was not accomplished without much difficulty and some danger; for the narrow pathway, leading over rocky, almost perpendicular, cliffs, three to four hundred feet high, had, in places, almost entirely crumbled away.
The summits of these cliffs present a curious appearance--fifty to sixty needle-like spires, hardly a couple of feet thick at the top, which look as if the hand of man and not of nature had placed them in the symmetrical order in which they stand, white and clear-cut against the deep-blue sky, slender and fragile as sugar ornaments, and looking as though a puff of wind would send them toppling over.

The ascent was terribly hard work for the camels, and, as the track is totally unprotected by guard-rail of any kind, anything but comfortable for their riders.