in
their ceaseless brawling, their women enjoy. Many forts are built at
some distance from any pool or spring. When these are besieged, the
women are allowed by the assailants to carry water to the foot of the
walls by night. In the morning the defenders come out and fetch it--of
course under fire--and are enabled to continue their resistance. But
passing from the military to the social aspect of their lives, the
picture assumes an even darker shade, and is unrelieved by any redeeming
virtue. We see them in their squalid, loopholed hovels, amid dirt and
ignorance, as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce
as the tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful. Those
simple family virtues, which idealists usually ascribe to primitive
peoples, are conspicuously absent. Their wives and their womenkind
generally, have no position but that of animals. They are freely bought
and sold, and are not infrequently bartered for rifles. Truth is unknown
among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from
which they regard an oath. In any dispute about a field boundary, it is
customary for both claimants to walk round the boundary he claims, with
a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own
land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over
his neighbor's land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his
shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of
swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of an appeal to force.

All are held in the grip of miserable superstition. The power of the
ziarat, or sacred tomb, is wonderful. Sick children are carried on the
backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited
in front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back--if they
survive the journey--in the same way. It is painful even to think of
what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle
tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious
than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in
the ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit
swinging a stone or coloured glass ball, suspended by a string from a
tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine
male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered
on some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few
insta