nt in
pursuit of him and he was brought back.

This seemed so marvellous that I thought it might be a chance. We were
then only twenty-two miles from Lawah. I repeated the experiment for
three or four days from subsequent camps, until the cat reconciled
himself to his new position and declined to run away. I took the trouble
to revolve him round himself several times to mislead him in his
bearings, but each time he found his correct position by the sun and his
own shadow, and never made a mistake in the absolutely correct bearings
of his route.

A remarkable fact in connection with this is that the most ignorant
natives of Persia, men who have never seen or heard of a compass, can
tell you the exact direction of places by a very similar method, so that
there is more in the process than we think.

It is rather humiliating when we reflect that what we highly civilised
people can only do with difficulty with the assistance of elaborate
theodolites, sextants, artificial horizons, compasses and lengthy
computations, an ignorant camel man, or a kitten, can do practically and
simply and always correctly in a few seconds by drawing conclusions on
facts of nature which speak for themselves better than all the scientific
instruments we can manufacture.

There was a high mountain north-east of camp, the Darband, 8,200 feet,
and as my fever seemed to be getting worse, and I had no quinine with
which to put a sudden stop to it, I thought I would climb to the top of
the mountain to sweat the fever out, and also to obtain a view of the
surrounding country.

After having slept some three hours and having partaken of a meal--we had
the greatest difficulty in raising enough animal fuel for a fire--I
started off about one in the afternoon under a broiling sun. The camp was
at an altitude of 4,350 feet and the ascent not difficult but very steep
and rocky, and involving therefore a good deal of violent exertion. The
dark rocks were so hot with the sun that had been shining upon them that
they nearly burned one's fingers when one touched them. Still, the view
from the top well repaid one for the trouble of getting there.

A general survey showed that the highest mountain to be seen around was
to the south-south-east (150 deg. bearings magnetic), and a couple of almost
conical hills, exactly alike in shape, but not in size, stood one in
front of the other on a line with 160 deg. b.m. Between them both to east and
west were a number of