rverseness that manages to find lodgement within the
unsightly curves and angles of a runaway camel. A riding-camel, led by
its owner, scares at the bicycle, and, breaking away, leads him a lively
chase through a belt of low sand ridges near the road, jolting various
packages off his back as he runs. Every time the man gets almost within
seizing distance of the rope, the contrary camel starts off again in a
long, awkward lope, slowing up again, as though maliciously inviting his
owner to try it over again, when he has covered a couple of hundred
yards. These manoeuvres are repeated again and again, until the chase has
extended to perhaps four miles, when a party of travellers assist in
rounding him up; the man then has to re-traverse the whole four miles and
gather up the things.

A late luncheon of bread, warm from the oven, is obtained at the village
of Lafaram, where I likewise obtain a peep behind the scenes of everyday
village life, and see something of their mode of baking bread. The walled
village of Lafaram presents a picture of manure heaps, holes of filthy
water, mud-hovels, naked, sore eyed youngsters, unkempt, unwashed,
bedraggled females, goats, chickens, and all the unsavory elements that
enter into the composition of a wretched, semi-civilized community. With
bare, uncombed heads, bare-armed, bare-breasted, and bare-limbed, and
with their nakedness scarcely hidden beneath a few coarse rags, some of
the women are engaged in making and baking bread, and others in the
preparation of tezek from cow manure and chopped straw. In carrying on
these two occupations the women mingle, chat, and help each other with
happy-go-lucky indifference to consequences, and with a breezy
unconsciousness of there being anything repulsive about the idea of
handling hot cakes with one hand and tezek with the other. The ovens are
huge jars partially sunk in the ground; fire is made inside and the jar
heated; flat cakes of dough are then stuck in the inside of the jar, a
few minutes sufficing for the baking. The hand and arm the woman inserts
inside the heated jar is wrapped with old rags and frequently dipped in a
jar of water standing by to keep it cooled; the bread thus baked tastes
very good when fresh, but it requires a stomach rendered unsqueamish by
dire necessity to relish it after seeing it baked.

The plain beyond Lafaram assumes the character of an acclivity, that in
four farsakhs terminates in a pass through a spur of h