Yazdi reports that Abbas walked 67km in one stage over the Darya Namak (literally, ‘salt sea’). This distance seems impractical: although I agreed with Pietro della Valle that the walking over this otherworldly landscape is “truly the most agreeable that I can say” – at dusk and in the night, anyway; in 1617, della Valle stopped at “a small space of black, dry ground that the King [Abbas] caused to be brought once, because to satisfy his devotion, he went on a foot pilgrimage to one of their mosques, in Chorazan [at Mashhad, in Khurasan]”.
