The Hidden Treasure
the hill. He wore a quilted jacket woven in a litde Cashmere
pattern, and had two knives in his sash. At the back of his
bald forehead was a turban all on one side. He was clean
shaven, with two bright dancing eyes very near together,
and an enormous nose. His mouth was as ready to smile as
his eyes. He moved with a keen decided air, and carried his
luggage in a small handkerchief at the end of a stick. He called
a greeting, took me in with one look, and came across the
brook to join us. He was, they told me, a Malikshahi from
the other side of Kebir Kuh. He would have made a very
good picture for " A Soldier of Fortune."
Though the Bedrei, on the east of Kebir Kuh, always
mention the Malikshahis on the west of it as lawless beings
of an inferior kind, this wandering tribesman seemed to be
on friendly terms with the Larti and with Sa'id Ja'far too.
The country is so solitary that everyone in it is known who
is anyone at all, and it is the most absurd fallacy to imagine
that a lonely region is the one for inconspicuous secrecy.
One could indeed travel for months in die Pusht-i-Kuh
unknown to the authorities, but only by having all the tribes-
men in the secret and in league.
The question of the moment, as we sat outside the hut on
its poor carpets drinking tea, was the matter of my givas.
I had bought an elegant pair in the Baghdad bazaar, but the
hills had been too much for them, and my toes, innocent of
stockings, which I had been wearing out at the rate of a pair
a day, had nothing left between them and the stones. The
Larti are not giva makers like the Hindimini, but the small
boy of the neighbouring hut happened to be at work on a
pair for himself. Unlike the city things, these were stout
footwear, their uppers made with strong needle weaving of
cord-like wool, and the soles of strips of leather hard as wood,
arranged to be flexible on the same principle as the top of a
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