low hills on all sides.

On being asked why he had made the camels go so fast on this march, Ali
Murat, my camel man, blushingly confessed that in this village was his
home and his wife, whom he had not seen for eight months. The anxiety to
see his better half, who lived only a stone-throw from where we made
camp, did not, however, prevent him looking carefully after his camels,
whom he placed first of all in his affection, and smoking Sadek's
cigarettes, and a pipe with the other camel men, and waiting till my tea
had been brewed to receive his customary six cups. After all this had
been gone through, which took the best part of two hours, he disappeared
and we did not see him again for the remainder of the morning.

The people of Fedeshk were striking for two reasons, first for being
sadly fever-stricken, secondly because they were addicted to opium
smoking to a disastrous degree. There were a number of opium dens in the
place, and I went to see them. They were dreadful places, in which one
would suspect opium smoking was not the only vice indulged in by the
natives.

As I entered one of these houses, after a considerable knocking at the
door and a great rustling of people running about the small courtyard
inside, we were admitted into a room so dark that I at first could
discern nothing at all. The pungent, sickening odour of the opium pipes
gave one quite a turn, and I lighted up a match to see where I was.

There were men lying about on mats in a semi-stupefied state, and men
attendants refilling the pipes--similar to those used in China, a cane
holder with earthenware pipe in which tiny pills of opium were inserted
and consumed over the flame of a small lamp. Several of the men were in
such a torpid state that they mechanically inhaled the opium smoke when
the pipes were pressed to their lips, but were hardly cognizant of what
went about around them. The opium-den keeper in the meantime did a
roaring business, and had a little scale on which he weighed the opium
that he served out.

It seemed evident, as I lighted match after match, by certain articles of
ladies' attire which in the hurried departure had been left behind in the
room, that the usual attendants of the smokers were women, but they had
stampeded away on our arrival. One heard them chuckle in the adjoining
rooms, and in their haste, they had left behind a great many pairs of
slippers at the entrance of the room.

I had two men conveyed out into t