peat fire. They are a queer race, these Eeliauts, [B] and
have little or nothing in common with the other natives. The sight of
a well-filled lunch-basket and flasks of wine (which our kind hosts
had insisted on our taking) would have brought ordinary gipsies out
like flies round a honey-pot, if recollections of Epsom or Henley go
for anything. Not so the Eeliauts, who, stranger still, never even
begged for a sheis--a self-control I rewarded by presenting the
chief, a swarthy handsome fellow, in picturesque rags of bright
colour, with a couple of kerans. But he never even thanked me!

It seemed, next morning, as if we had jumped, in a night, from early
spring into midsummer. Although at daybreak the ice was thick on a
pool outside the caravanserai, the sun by midday was so strong, and
the heat so excessive, that we could scarcely get the mules along.
The road lies through splendid scenery. Passing Dashti Arjin, or "The
Plain of Wild Almonds," a kind of plateau to which the ascent is
steep and difficult, one might have been in Switzerland or the Tyrol.
Undulating, densely wooded hills, with a background of steep limestone
cliffs, their sharp peaks, just tipped with snow, standing out crisp
and clear against the cloudless sky, formed a fitting frame to the
lovely picture before us; the pretty village, trees blossoming on all
sides, fresh green pastures overgrown in places by masses of fern and
wild flowers, and the white foaming waterfall dashing down the side of
the mountain, to lose itself in the blue waters of a huge lake just
visible in the plains below. The neighbourhood of the latter teems
with game of all kinds--leopard, gazelle, and wild boar, partridge,
duck, snipe, and quail, the latter in thousands.

A stiff climb of four hours over the Kotal Perizun brought us to the
caravanserai of Meyun Kotal. Over this pass, ten miles in length,
there is no path; one must find one's way as best one can through the
huge rocks and boulders. Some of the latter were two to three feet
in height. How the mules managed will ever be a mystery to me. We
dismounted, leaving, by the chalvadar's request, our animals to look
after themselves. The summit of the mountain is under two thousand
feet. We reached it at four o'clock, and saw, to our relief, our
resting-place for the night only three or four hundred feet below us.
But it took nearly an hour to do even this short distance. The passage
of the Kotal Perizun with a large caravan m