LETTER xvi A SERIOUS INCIDENT 17

watching the Lurs, dark, handsome savages, armed with
loaded clubbed sticks, and the Agha was asking them
about the country, when suddenly there was a m$Ue, and
the semblance of an attack on him with the clubs. He
seemed to shake his assailants off, lounged towards his
mule, took his revolver from the holster, fired it in the
air, and with an unconcerned, smiling face, advanced
towards the savages, and saying something like calling
attention to the excellences of that sort of firearm, fired
two bullets close over their heads. They dread our arms
greatly, and fell back, and molested us no further. Till
later I did not know that the whole thing was not a
joke on both sides. Aziz says that if it had ntfjT been
for the Agha's coolness, all our lives would havvi been
sacrificed.

In returning, the Agha, walking along a lower track
than we were riding upon, met some Lurs, who, thinking
that he was alone, began to be insolent, and he heard
them say to each other, " Strip him, kill him," when their
intention was frustrated by our appearance just above.
After crossing the Serba torrent with its delicious shade
of fine plane trees, the heat of the atmosphere, with the
radiation from rock and gravel, was overpowering, I
found the mercury at 103° in my shady tent.

Aziz Khan now pays me a visit each evening, to
me such information as is attainable regarding the pe
and locality, and, though he despised me at first, *
Moslem fashion, we are now very good friends. He
brave man, and made no attempt to magnify the dar
at Gorab, merely saying that he was devoutly thanl
that we had escaped with our lives. He remonstra
with me for pitching my tent in such a lonely pi*
quite out of sight of the other camps, but it was tl
too dark to move it. He said that there was some ri
for the Lurs had declared they would " rob us yet," b

VOL. II C