It was the wintry
weather which was his own, and Alice's face, framed in a cloak, as he
had seen it at the Broken Bridge, rose in the gallery of his heart. In
a moment he was disillusioned. Success, enterprise, new lands and faces
seemed the most dismal vexation of spirit. With a very bitter heart he
walked home, and, after the fashion of his silent kind, gave no sign of
his mood save by a premature and unreasonable retirement to bed.

CHAPTER XXI

IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS

All around was stone and scrub, rising in terraces to the foot of sheer
cliffs which opened up here and there in nullahs and gave a glimpse of
great snow hills behind them. On one of the flat ridge-tops a little
village of stunted, slaty houses squatted like an ape, with a vigilant
eye on twenty gorges. Thin, twisting paths led up to it, and before, on
the more clement slopes, some fields of grain were tilled as our Aryan
forefathers tilled the soil on the plains of Turkestan. The place was
at least 8,000 feet above the sea, so the air was highland, clear and
pleasant, save for the dryness which the great stone deserts forced upon
the soft south winds. You will not find the place marked in any map,
for it is a little beyond even the most recent geographer's ken, but it
is none the less a highly important place, for the nameless village is
one of the seats of that most active and excellent race of men, the
Bada-Mawidi, who are so old that they can afford to look down on their
neighbours from a vantage-ground of some thousands of years. It is well
known that when God created the earth He first fashioned this tangle of
hill land, and set thereon a primitive Bada-Mawidi, the first of the
clan, who was the ancestor, in the thousandth degree, of the excellent
Fazir Khan, the present father of the tribe.

The houses clustered on the scarp and enclosed a piece of well-beaten
ground and one huge cedar tree. Sounds came from the near houses, but
around the tree itself the more privileged sat in solemn conclave. Food
and wine were going the round, for the Maulai kohammedans have no taboos
in eating and drinking. Fazir Khan sat smoking next the tree trunk, a
short, sinewy man with a square, Aryan face, clear-cut and cruel. His
chiefs were around him, all men of the same type, showing curiously fair
skins against their oiled black hair. A mullah sat cross-legged, his
straggling beard in his lap, repeating some crazy charm to himself and
looking every no