,
malaria, enteric and pneumonia fairly recently.

"And had the hand of your brother anything to do with the little drops
of water that made Ibrahim the Weeper so blind?" I asked.

"Something, Sahib," replied Mir Daoud Khan with a laugh, "but the hand
of Allah had more than that of my brother. It is a strange story. True
stories are sometimes far stranger than those of the bazaar tale-tellers
whose trade it is to invent or remember wondrous tales and stories,
myths, and legends."

"We have a proverb to that effect, Mir Saheb. Let us sit in the shelter
of this rock and you shall tell me the story. Our eyes can work while
tongue and ear play--or would you sleep?"

"_Nahin_, Sahib! Am I a Sahib that I should regard night as the time
wholly sacred to sleep and day as the time when to sleep is sin? I will
tell the Sahib the tale of the Blindness of Ibrahim Mahmud the Weeper,
well knowing that he, a truth-speaker, will believe the truth spoken by
his servant. To no liar would it seem possible.

"Know then, Sahib, that this brother of mine was not my mother's son,
though the son of my father (Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan Mir Faquir Mahommed
Afzul Khan), who was the youngest son of His Highness the Jam Saheb of
Mekran Kot in Kubristan. And he, my father, was a great traveller, a
restless wanderer, and crossed the Black Water many times. To Englistan
he went, and without crossing water he also went to the capital of the
Amir of Russia to say certain things, quietly, from the King of Islam,
the Amir of Afghanistan. To where the big Waler horses come from he also
went, and to where they take the camels for use in the hot and sandy
northern parts."

"Yes, Australia" I remarked.

"Without doubt, if the Sahib be pleased to say it. And there, having
taken many camels in a ship that he might sell them at a profit, he
wedded a white woman--a woman of the race of the Highland soldiers of
Englistan, such as are in this very Brigade."

"Married a Scotchwoman?"

"Without doubt. Of a low caste--her father being a drunkard and landless
(though grandson of a Lord Sahib), living by horses and camels menially,
out-casted, a jail-bird. Formerly he had carried the mail through the
desert, a fine rider and brave man, but _sharab_[1] had loosened the
thigh in the saddle and palsied hand and eye. On hearing this news, the
Jam Saheb was exceeding wroth, for he had planned a good marriage for
his son, and he arranged that the woman should die if my