The Great Mountain
This morning, however, we started early. The ladies woke
up in darkness to bake our bread: the embers of the fire, which
had died down in the tent through the night, were piled with
fresh oak branches to fight the chill that comes before day-
break: and at five-thirty, with the light increasing, as if it
were thrown in giant handfuls from behind the mountain
rim into the upper air, we set off downhill to the plain.
The sun came towards us and the long shadows shrank as
we advanced. Below, in small hollows on our right hand,
the infant waters of the Pir Muhammad stream, which we
met again above its skirted defile, shone with a peaceful early
morning brightness. Shepherds from the tents were taking
out their flocks, that walked in long files before them, with
pattering feet like a summer shower.
The Great Mountain has, as it were, an outwork of low
foothills wooded with oak. These trees have bigger leaves
than ours, of a dull green without much life in it, and bigger
acorns, too, with large frilly cups and pointed fruit, just begin-
ning to turn yellow. In a bad year, when want of rain has
killed the harvests, the Lurs make flour of these acorns, letting
them first soak in water for three days to " take out the
heaviness." They roast them in ashes also, and eat them whole
like chestnuts. But they say that many pains and illnesses
follow on this diet. The oak leaves, as well as roofing the
summer tents, are regularly used as fodder for the flocks in
the dry season. They clothed the foothills thickly, growing
to a good size on either side, while we kept out in tie open
and followed a torrent bed of white stones that ran straight
and wide like an avenue towards the mountain.
The harmony of the morning hour, if such a thing really
exists, was shattered as far as we were concerned by the
discovery that, with an uninhabited day before us, no one had
remembered the chicken. Shah Riza, whose job it was,
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