and among them is one man totally blind. The loss
of sight has not dimmed his inquisitiveness any, however; nothing could
do that, and he gets someone to lead him into my room, where he makes an
exhaustive examination of the bicycle with his hands.

A village luti entertains me during the evening with a dancing deer; a
comical affair of wood, made to dance on a table by jerking a string. The
luti plays a sort of "whangadoodle" tune on a guitar, and manipulates the
string so as to make the deer keep time to the tune. He tells me he
obtained it from Hindostan.

Among the wiseacres gathered around me plying questions, is one who asks,
"Chand menzils inja to London?" He wants to know how many marches, or
stopping-places, there are between Karize and London. This is a fair
illustration of what these people think the world is like. His idea of a
journey from here to London is that of stages across a desert country
like Persia from one caravanserai to another; beyond that conception
these people know nothing. London, they think, would be some such place
as Herat or Meshed.

At the hour of my departure from Karize, on the following morning, a
little old man presents himself, and wants me to employ him as an escort.
The old fellow is a shrivelled-up little bit of a man, whom I could
well-nigh hold out at arm's length and lift up with one hand. Not feeling
the need of either guide or guard particularly, I decline the old
fellow's services "with thanks," and push on; happy, in fact, to find
myself once more untrammelled by native company.

Small towers of refuge, dotting the plain thickly about Karize, tell of
past depredations by the Turkomans. An outlying village like Karize must,
indeed, have had a hard struggle for existence; right in the heart of the
daman country, too. For miles the plain is found to be grassy as the
Western prairies; an innovation from the dreary gray of the camel-thorn
dasht that is quite refreshing. A stream or two has to be forded, and
many Afghans are met returning from pilgrimage to Meshed.

The village of Torbet-i-Sheikh Jahm is reached at noon, a pleasant town
containing many shade-trees. Here, I find, resides Ab-durrahzaak Khan, a
sub-agent of Mirza Abbas Khan, and consequently a servant of the Indian
Government. He is one of the frontier agents, whose duty it is to keep
track of events in a certain section of country and report periodically
to headquarters. He, of course, receives me hospitabl