The Hidden Treasure
The Pir Muhammad would have led us all the way to the
foot of the Great Mountain, but most of the defiles through
which these torrents wind are too difficult even for Lurish
paths, and we soon had to turn aside and climb on to the
shoulders of the hills. They were tumbled in strata wilder
than any we had seen before, but yet with a curious regularity,
as if titanic hands had laid the blocks of stone in even courses,
tilted and twisted for some incredible architecture. The
trees among the rocks gave them beauty: and presently we
left the lower chaos, and came to smooth hillsides, with oaks
not thickly planted, but each one separate in its own shadow
on the bare white gravel of the soil. Here was no habitation,
but a friendly peace: and woodcutters in white tunics driving
asses now and then upon the road: and in the fall of the evening
we came down by one shoulder after the other, till we saw
a plain below us and the Great Mountain like a curtain beyond
it in the dusk.
Black tents in groups of two and three, very small in their
loneliness, showed in cultivated patches down below. We
did not go so far, but coming by a small spring on the hillside,
found there three young and pretty women stooping over
goatskins to fill them with water, and eager, when they saw
we were travellers, to invite us to the poorness of their tents
close by.
It was a small colony of four tents, the first of the Arkwaz
land, and there was no chieftain to entertain us. The people
were so poor that they had neither meat nor fowl nor eggs,
milk, rice, tea, nor sugar: nothing in fact but the essential
bag of flour and a tiny patch of tomatoes and cucumbers,
of which they proceeded to pick every one with the noble
hospitality of their code.
There were three charming women. I left the men outside
and came to them by the fire, out of the night wind. An
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