have lost their canine propensity to resent innovations; the
result, no doubt, of the same dreary, uneventful round of existence, in
which the faculty of resentment has become dwarfed by the general absence
of anything new or novel to bark at.

The tents of the Eliautes are small and inelegant as compared with the
tents of well-to-do Koords, and the physique and general appearance of
the Eliautes themselves is vastly inferior to the magnificent fellows
that we found loafing about the headquarters of the Koordish sheikhs in
Asia Minor and Western Persia.

The trail I am now following is evidently but little used, requiring the
tracking instincts of an Indian almost to keep it in view. It leads due
southward across the broad, level wastes of the Goonabad Desert, the
surface of which affords most excellent wheeling even where there is not
the faintest indication of a trail. Much of the surface partakes of the
character of bare mud-flats that afford as smooth a wheeling surface as
the alkali flats of the West; the surface is covered all over with crisp
sun peelings--the thin, shiny surface of mud, baked and curled upward by
the fierce heat of the sun, and which now crackle like myriads of dried
twigs beneath the wheel. Occasionally I pass through thousands of acres
of wild tulips, and scattering bands of antelopes are observed feeding in
the distance. The bulbous roots of a great many of the tulips have been
eaten by herbivorous animals of epicurean tastes---our fastidious
friends, the antelopes, no doubt. The flags are bitten off and laid
aside, the tender, white interior of the bulb alone is extracted and
eaten, the less tender outside layers being left in the hole. It is a
glorious ride across the Goonabad Desert, a ten-mile pace being quite
possible most of the way; sometimes the trail is visible and sometimes it
is not. With but the vaguest idea of the distance to the next abode of
man, or the nature of the country ahead, I bowl along southward, led by
the strange infatuation of a pathfinder traversing terra incognita, and
rejoicing in the sense of boundless freedom and unrestraint that comes of
speeding across open country where Nature still holds her primitive sway.

Twice I wheel past the ruins of wayside umbars, whose now utterly
neglected condition and the well-nigh obliterated trail point out that I
am travelling over a route that has for some reason been abandoned. A
variation from the otherwise universal leve