at strange
being, half-devil, half-martyr, at once cruel and a coward--the Khan,
her husband, and his polluted court. In front lay the fire, the snow and
the mystery they hid, sought for so many empty years. Now we would solve
it or we would die. So we pressed forward joyfully to meet our fate,
whatever it might be.

For many hours our road ran deviously through cultivated land, where the
peasants at their labour laid down their tools and gathered into knots
to watch us pass, and quaint, flat-roofed villages, whence the women
snatched up their children and fled at the sight of us. They believed us
to be lords from the court who came to work them some harm in person or
in property, and their terror told _us_ how the country smarted beneath
the rod of the oppressor. By mid-day, although the peak seemed to be
but little nearer, the character of the land had changed. Now it sloped
gently upwards, and therefore could not be irrigated.

Evidently all this great district was dependent on the fall of
timely rains, which had not come that spring. Therefore, although the
population was still dense and every rod of the land was under the
plough or spade, the crops were failing. It was pitiful to see the
green, uneared corn already turning yellow because of the lack of
moisture, the beasts searching the starved pastures for food and the
poor husbandmen wandering about their fields or striving to hoe the iron
soil.

Here the people seemed to know us as the two foreigners whose coming had
been noised abroad, and, the fear of famine having made them bold, they
shouted at us as we went by to give them back the rain which we had
stolen, or so we understood their words. Even the women and the children
in the villages prostrated themselves before us, pointing first to the
Mountain and then to the hard, blue sky, and crying to us to send them
rain. Once, indeed, we were threatened by a mob of peasants armed with
spades and reaping-hooks, who seemed inclined to bar our path, so that
we were obliged to put our horses to a gallop and pass through them
with a rush. As we went forward the country grew ever more arid and its
inhabitants more scarce, till we saw no man save a few wandering herds
who drove their cattle from place to place in search of provender.

By evening we guessed that we had reached that border tract which was
harried by the Mountain tribes, for here strong towers built of stone
were dotted about the heaths, doubtless to