Night in the hills
grasses in the beds of dry gullies, that looked soft from far
away, changed, as we approached, into desiccated beds of
thorns.
As the darkness began to fall we turned aside into a fold of
the land, under a high cliff ridge called Zamiyah Kuh, out of
sight so as to leave the path clear through the night to the
Malikshahi smugglers.
A cold wind came creeping, not the fierce batterer of the
desert, but an insidious creature that chilled one to the bone.
The Philosopher, with great resourcefulness, seized my spare
Burberry and put it on. Alidad made a fire in a small gully.
Shah Riza answered my enquiries as to food by the remark
that we had lots of flour, and the muleteers, having unpacked
and settled down, began to mix a few handfuls of it with
water, to pat it into a disc about an inch thick, and put it
under the embers to cook. Shah Riza, whose dealings with
the Burberry had shown a touch of the Epicurean, must
belong to the Stoics after all, I reflected, and began to hunt
for sardines in my saddle-bags.
" Another time," said I, " a chicken, alive or dead, is to be
carried with us into any desert." The three men agreed that
female fragility might reasonably require such knick-knacks.
They cleared a small space near the fire for my sleeping-
sack to lie evenly, settled themselves on the other side, and
we were soon engulfed in the high, thin, nightly silence of the
hills.
The Law of Hospitality
The Philosopher had been rather perturbed by the fact that
his mare, a vicious grey with a blind eye, slipped over the
edge during our descent from Gildar. The edge was not
quite sheer, and she slid on her four hooves with the smuggler
hanging on behind, using the tail as a rudder: the operation
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