The landit
circumstances I should have walked. But I was making a
plan, which involved fatiguing my escort while I myself kept
fresh, and so I remained seated, watching the men climbing
with easy mountaineering strides ahead. It was full morning
and the sun was hot: the white slope, dotted with broom
bushes and small shrubs, glistened in the sun: we were being
lifted up again into the joyful loneliness of hills. At the top
of the mountain's long torpedo ridge runs an important
track from an Imamzadeh on the Saidmarreh banks, along the
level height, and down into the plain of Shirwan on the north-
west. The track keeps a little north of the ridge up to a point
where that dips and rises again to another ridge, parallel,
higher, and equally long; so that for a lonely stretch the road
lies, as it were, in a hammock elevated between the two hills,
out of sight of everything except their solitary summits.
This, Sa'id Ja'far said to me, was a place almost always infested
by thieves. As we emerged on to it, a man leaped out from
a small gully below us, and sped over the rocks. Our police-
man swung his gun and shot at him.
This was the first time in my life that I saw, as I thought, a
brigand, and I cannot say that I felt anything except a pleasant
exhilaration. There was a little band of them down the road,
and our policeman, Sa'id Ja'far, and Ali were bearing down
upon them, fast but cautiously, as if they expected to be shot
at. Beyond, making downhill as fast as their legs would carry
them, were two men with some goats. It went through my
mind in a flash that this was curious impedimenta for a robber
band to'be burdened with, but I was too much absorbed in
our own party to trouble with inferences. I stopped my horse
under a little thorn tree, and watched the operations, like the
damsel in a medieval romance, hoping for a battle.
The brigands, after wavering a moment or two, decided
not to wait for our advance, and turned downhill, leaping like
ims]