Law and the ranievi mi
This question has never been solved. The man looked so
guilty that I felt my worst suspicions confirmed, and only
later, when I noticed how every Lur looks guilty when con-
fronted with the Law, began to think that perhaps he was
innocent after all.
Meanwhile we were not to be allowed to go on. We
should have lunch first, said the policeman, anxious cotite que
coute to make us do something we had not intended. It is
tempting to give a soft answer when one knows that it will
annoy, and we felt no great aversion to the idea of lunch.
But partly so as to go on in the game of contradicting, and
partly because it would be taken as a want of friendliness to
the villagers, I refused to sit in solitude with my escort under
a tree as arranged, and moved up into one of the tribesmen's
tents instead.
Here as we crouched over the fire and watched a chicken
turning like an heraldic animal on a spit, our feelings gradually
softened. Our chance of making Alishtar that night was
gone—but what is a day more or less on a journey? The
policeman for his part had made us sit still when we wanted
to go on, and could therefore feel authority safe in his hands.
He began to look with appraising eyes at my aluminium water-
bottle and to soliloquize on the usefulness of such objects to
lonely guardians doomed to live far from their fellows in
the hills. As for the Lurs, they drew gradually near to the
one subject in which they are chiefly interested just now—
and that is the subject of clothes.
They were given a year long ago to obtain European,
coat and trousers and a Paklevi hat. No one had thought
of doing so: fairy tales, which know human nature, always
give a year and a day, and the hero does not begin to
think about the matter till the last evening. Now a new
message had come through from Teheran, and five days