ning. The town appeared to be a small one of not much over two
thousand inhabitants, all of whom were engaged in agricultural pursuits
and in camel-breeding. The herds of camels, however, they gathered, for
the most part were kept at outlying settlements on the farther side of
the cone-shaped mountain. As they were unable to talk the language the
only person from whom they could gain knowledge was Harut, who spoke
to them in his broken English and told them much what he had told me,
namely that the upper mountain was a sacred place that might only be
visited by the priests, since any uninitiated person who set foot there
came to a bad end. They had not seen any of these priests in the town,
where no form of worship appeared to be practised, but they had observed
men driving small numbers of sheep or goats up the flanks of the
mountain towards the forest.

Of what went on upon this mountain and who lived there they remained
in complete ignorance. It was a case of stalemate. Harut would not tell
them anything nor could they learn anything for themselves. He added in
a depressed way that the whole business seemed very hopeless, and that
he had begun to doubt whether there was any tidings of his lost wife to
be gained among the Kendah, White or Black.

Now I repeated to him Marut's dying words, of which most unhappily I had
never heard the end. These seemed to give him new life since they showed
that tidings there was of some sort, if only it could be extracted. But
how might this be done? How, how?

For a whole week things went on thus. During this time I recovered
my strength completely, except in one particular which reduced me to
helplessness. The place on my thigh where Jana had pinched out a bit of
the skin healed up well enough, but the inflammation struck inwards to
the nerve of my left leg, where once I had been injured by a lion, with
the result that whenever I tried to move I was tortured by pains of a
sciatic nature. So I was obliged to lie still and to content myself
with being carried on the bed into a little garden which surrounded
the mud-built and white-washed house that had been allotted to us as a
dwelling-place.

There I lay hour after hour, staring at the Holy Mount which began
to spring from the plain within a few hundred yards of the scattered
township. For a mile or so its slopes were bare except for grass on
which sheep and goats were grazed, and a few scattered trees. Studying
the place thr