The Hidden Treasure
The Wakkil-Bashi seemed to be uncertain about the
way. We had reached, he thought, the last camp before a
long stretch of desert. It was a good-sized place with one
or two houses used as granaries: it was called Sar-i-Tang,
because it stood almost at the entrance to a defile into which
the Gangir plunges. And everyone in the camp was out
of doors, measuring the harvest. The Shah's agent, together
with the master of each crop, superintended the division:
the government pile was put on one side; the peasant's
share was carried back in sacks loaded on black oxen, to
be buried in the ground. Holes were being dug at a little
distance. Out of the peasant's two-thirds, the seed corn
for next season had to be found.
We enquired what lay before us, and the people of Sar-i-
Tang told us that we should reach Bani Chinar before night.
So we rode on, with the defile called Shamiran on our left,
over a small col where oak trees still grew, already stunted
in the warmer soil.
There was a ruined castle, we heard, on Shamiran: and
graves with bronzes are found along the valley. It must
have been a highway for traffic in every age, since nature
here provides a natural cleft from the Saidmarreh River
system to the plains of Iraq; and Moslem ruins are traceable
here and there at intervals along the valley. As we came to
the top of the shoulder through which the river cuts its way,
seven ranges spread before us, the red and barren ranges of
the waterless belt of the frontier. The smugglers know
them and slip in and out of the thirsty gullies. They are
caught, but not so very often.
"Do I not always turn my face the other way?" my
lieutenant captor had asked the kaclkhuda, when the latter
complained of the difficulty of getting tea and sugar now in
the Pusht-i-Kuh.
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