stward. The Constable's guides led them through the
mountains, up long sword-cuts of valleys and under frowning snowdrifts,
or across stony barrens where wretched beehive huts huddled by the
shores of unquiet lakes. Presently they came into summer, and found
meadows of young grass and green forests on the hills' skirts, and saw
wide plains die into the blueness of morning. There the guides left
them, and the little cavalcade moved east into unknown anarchies.

The sky grew like brass over their heads, and the land baked and rutted
with the sun's heat. It seemed a country empty of man, though sometimes
they came on derelict ploughlands and towns of crumbling brick charred
and glazed by fire. In sweltering days they struggled through flats
where the grass was often higher than a horse's withers, and forded the
tawny streams which brought down the snows of the hills. Now and then
they would pass wandering herdsmen, who fled to some earth-burrow at
their appearance. The Constable had bidden them make for the rising
sun, saying that sooner or later they would foregather with the Khakan's
scouts. But days passed into weeks and weeks into months, and still they
moved through a tenantless waste. They husbanded jealously the food
they had brought, but the store ran low, and there were days of empty
stomachs and light heads. Unless, like the King of Babylon, they were to
eat grass in the fashion of beasts, it seemed they must soon famish.

But late in summertime they saw before them a wall of mountain, and in
three days climbed by its defiles to a pleasant land, where once more
they found the dwellings of man. It appeared that they were in a country
where the Tartars had been for some time settled and which had for years
been free of the ravages of war. The folks were hunters and shepherds
who took the strangers for immortal beings and offered food on bent
knees like oblations to a god. They knew where the Ilkhan dwelt, and
furnished guides for each day's journey. Aimery, who had been sick of a
low fever in the plains, and had stumbled on in a stupor torn by flashes
of homesickness, found his spirits reviving. He had cursed many times
the futility of his errand. While the Franciscans were busied with their
punctual offices and asked nothing of each fresh day but that it should
be as prayerful as the last, he found a rebellious unbelief rising in
his heart. He was travelling roads no Christian had ever trod, on
a wild-goose errand