The Hidden Treasure

scheme of things. Had he not treated me with a respect
almost excessive; he asked. Had he not humbled himself so far
as to allow me to put my foot upon his shoulder in mounting
on my mule: what word of complaint could I find?

" No complaint/' said I, mildly but firm. "What I want
is lunch with a view over both sides of the landscape."

Alidad had no language to meet this. But he opened both
hands and breathed hard at the listening hills and looked at
Shah Riza. The Philosopher, however, evidently knew a
determined woman when he saw one, and he himself liked
the look of his mountains. With my moral supremacy, as
I hoped, firmly established, I sat down in rather a cold wind
and pulled out my compass, and proceeded to disentangle,
with the help of the three tribesmen, the names of the unknown
hills.

Night in Garau
We made our way for hours down the northern slopes of
the Great Mountain before we reached the mills of Garau in
the valley.
The track was steep and bad, and little used at this rime of
the year; it followed a spur divided by a deep cleft from the
precipices which buttress the eastern side of Walantar. Then
it descended, and dipped into the oak woods as into a petrified
sea. No wind stirred there, no undergrowth grew in the
shade, no small creatures scurried among the trunks and
branches. The leaves of these oaks look dark, as if some
black had got into the colour by mistake; a tone I remember
being distressed over in childish water-colours when the
foliage was started before the sepia that had been used for the
trunk had got well out of the paint-brush.
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