ce had a
fall in the natural course of affairs. The animals, too, are generally so
intelligent that they do for one the balancing required and manage to
keep under the rider.

On that particular night I was extremely sleepy. I opened my eyes for a
second when we reached the pass and began to descend on the other side,
but sleepiness overcame me again. I was riding the first mule in the
caravan. Unexpectedly I received a fearful blow in the face, and I was
very nearly torn off the saddle. There was a curious metallic buzzing
resounding in the air, and before I had time to warn those that came
after, Sadek, who came next, was knocked down, and the mules, frightened
at this unusual occurrence, stampeded down the steep incline. It was the
telegraph wire hanging loose right across the road that had caused the
accident. The road was in zig-zag, and was crossed several times by the
wire which was laid more or less in a straight line. But this, of course,
I did not know, so a few minutes later, before we had time to bring the
runaway mules to a stop, the wire, unseen, was again met with a foot or
so above the ground. It caught the mules on the legs, and as they were
tied to one another, and were carried on by the impetus of the pace at
which we were going, all the animals tumbled down one on the top of the
other in a heap. The packs got mercilessly undone, and it took us the
best part of an hour to disentangle all and get things straight again.

The cold was bitter. Some two miles East of the pass there were two
roads, one leading to Nain, the other to Nao Gombes. We took the latter
and shorter route, and with some sense of relief now we left the
telegraph line, which proceeds to Nain.

On the plateau east of the pass, we found six small villages, the most
eastern--Eshratawat (Ishratabad)--being the largest (altitude 6,800 ft.).
When the sun was about to rise we more clearly distinguished a grey,
sombre, mountainous mass to the east, sharply indented at its summit,
like the teeth of a gigantic saw, and ending abruptly on the northern
terminus.

We had come between mountains, and some twelve miles from Fezahbad we
reached Kudarz (altitude 6,580 ft.), a village situated at the foot of
the range we had crossed. As the sun peeped above the mountains close by
to the east a large plain disclosed itself before the observer. A long
mountain range, bluish and indistinct, could just be perceived in the
distance, bounding the plain to