The HiUen Treasure
The summit of the ridge, when we came to it, was a de-
lightful place. Oak trees, well grown and round as cabbages,
spaced singly here and there, threw shady patterns on the
grass like splashes of Chinese embroidery on a tablecloth.
The yellow lawns spread more or less on a level with gentle
ups and downs. From die edge on the right one had only a
monotonous ridge in sight across the dip we had skirted that
morning: but the other edge jutted on to space. It went
steeply down like a wave just gathering, and looked on the
Saidmarreh River, green as paint in the valley below. Be-
hind us the wave continued, descending in tree-dotted slopes
to the plain of Shirwan, visible with, cultivation: that part of
the mountain backbone was Waraq Husil; we had seen its
other face from the pass of Milawur. From north-west, along
the plain, the river came winding in a ribbon of flat land where
the wintering tribes sow their corn: there it had eaten itself
a bed between low cliffs filled with thickets of tamarisk.
At present, but for a small cultivated patch of Rudbar Arabs
on our right, the land was empty. One beyond another,
long hills, cuirassed with flat slabs, lay behind die river like a
fleet at anchor, motionless and stripped for batde. Facing
us there, was a wall of a ridge called Barkus; not a blade of
grass appeared to grow upon it: its rusty boiler-plates of rocks
were cleft into shallow cracks for water, and its base was
decorated with a series of very regular pinky-white triangles,
where small streams, descending in parallel gullies, had laid
bare in so amusingly symmetrical a fashion the lower strata
of limestone in the soil. The foothills between Barkus and
the flat river-land, were all salty, and nothing, Sa'id Ja'far said,
would grow upon them: but they had here and there traces
of low mud walls which serve to surround and protect the
tents of the Lurs in winter, for the tribes live on that higher
ground above their riverain fields. The track from Lakistan,