The Hidden Treasure
gardens of the tribe: a path led into a valley and up again: it kept
west along a ridge and, after two gullies, came to a third where,
in a cave with five * wan' trees before it, the treasure lay hid.
" You cannot mistake it," said Hasan: " and if I am not
there, go and do what you can. But don't let the tribe notice
that you are searching for anything in particular."
This last condition, together with the sketchiness of the
map, seemed to make the affair quite hopeless. But it was
no bad thing to get an introduction to the tribe, and if nothing
came of it I still hoped to be able to go on along my own
projected way and discover ancient burial places in Tarhan.
The evening before I was to start, Hasan came once more
with a gaudy and engaging garment covered with flowers
which he said would make me inconspicuous in the Kurdish
hills. I had spent five rupees on a pale-brown abba with gold
at the neck, and a pair of cloth-soled giva shoes. I felt
equipped for any emergency. Our luggage was light: no
bed, but a sleeping-sack; a saddle-bag with clothes and medi-
cines on one side and food, chiefly tea and sugar, on the other.
Next morning Shah Riza, the guide, arrived, in a long yellow
and white striped garment with a ragged grey jacket, and a
blue turban wound round his untidy old head. He had no
luggage at all.
Shah Riza is really a maker of quilts, but he looks like a
philosopher, which, in his way, he is. His philosophy is one
of passive resistance to the slings and arrows of fortune as
they hurtle round him: he sits among them looking as if he
thought of something else, but ready, in his quiet way, to
make the most of any lull in the general perversity of things.
As an attendant he left much to be desired—everything in
fact if an attendant is supposed, as I take it, to attend. But
he was a charming old man, and would sit for hours, while
all was bustle around him, filling little tubes of paper with
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