The Hidden Treasure
filling their goatskins. My four policemen in their light-
blue uniforms made no discord in the picture as they stood
to water their horses. The sentry from the square fort
had seen them. The small flag fluttered at the top of the
keep in a light breeze from the north. Always, from the
earliest days of built houses, such a chain of towers, spaced
at convenient day's journeys, has probably linked these valleys
with government: it is the only way in which the country
can be held: and probably the same sort of sentry has watched
the flocks and the tribes from his evening doorstep in the
valley of Aiwan for longer than one would imagine, looking
at the treeless nomad cornland now.
The tents of the Aiwan were arranged in two or three
rows in the stubble-fields, and the chief who owned the first
and best of them came out to greet and welcome us with
more cordiality than I had ever seen since travelling with
an escort. I began to notice here a great difference in the
tribes, and a far larger measure of subservience than among
the Bedrei and Malikshahi: and the sergeant explained it
next day by telling me that here they do not, as in the region
of Kebir Kuh, own their own land, but the landlord is the
Shah, who sends his overseers to take a third of their harvest
every year. Something of the tribesman has gone, some-
thing of the peasant has crept into their manner. I regretted
it, though no doubt it makes them easier to govern.
It is not the turbulence of the tribesman that one admires:
but the virtues that go with his turbulence, so that the
two are associated together. His treasure is the freedom of
his spirit: when he loses that, he loses everything. And if
civilization is that state in which the unshackled mind bows
voluntarily to Law, freedom and discipline are the two
wheels on which it runs. The tribesman does bow to a
law of his own, but his apologists must admit that discipline
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