of the
young goat. They know each other thoroughly--as thoroughly as
orchard-looting, truant-playing, teacher-deceiving school-boys--these
three hopeful aspirants to the favor of Allah; they are an amusing trio,
and not a little instructive.

CHAPTER VIII.

ACROSS THE "DESERT OF DESPAIR."

For some hours we are traversing a singularly wild-looking country; it
seems as though the odds and ends of all creation were tossed
indiscriminately together. Rocky cliffs, sloping hills, riverbeds, dry
save from last night's thunder-storm, bits of sandy desert, strips of
alkaline flat or hard gravel, have been gathered up from various parts of
the earth and tossed carelessly in a heap here. It is an odd corner in
which the chips, the sweepings and trimmings, gathered up after the
terrestrial globe was finished, were apparently brought and dumped. There
is even a little bit of pasture, and at one point a little area of arable
land. Here are found four half-naked representatives of this strange,
wild border-land, living beneath one rude goat-hair tent, watching over a
few grazing goats and several acres of growing grain.

We arrive at this remarkable little community shortly after noon, and
halt a couple of hours to rest and feed the horses, and to kill and cook
the unhappy kid slung across the mudbake's saddle. The poor little
creature doesn't require very much killing; all the way from where it was
given into his tender charge its infantile bleatings have seemed to grate
harshly on the mudbake's unsympathetic ear, and he has handled it anywise
but tenderly. The four men found here are Persian Eliautes, a numerous
tribe, that seem to form a sort of connecting link between the genuine
nomads and the tillers of the soil. They are frequently found combining
the occupations of both, and might aptly be classed as semi-nomads.
Pitching their tents beside some outlying, isolated piece of cultivable
ground in the spring, they sow it with wheat or barley, and three months
later they reap a supply of grain to carry away with them when they
remove their flocks to winter pasturage.

An iron kettle is borrowed to stew the kid in, and when cooked a portion
is stowed away to carry with us. The Eliaute quartette contribute bowls
of mast and doke, and off this and the remainder of the stewed kid we all
make a hearty meal.

More than once of late have I been impressed by the striking, even
startling, resemblance of some person among the p