Cuckoos
dissuaded by noticing the consternation of the young police-
man, whose suspicions were evidently returning in full
force.
I had by this time decided to come back to Alamut some
time or other, and left it at that.
The policeman's wife was not there; she could not bear
the country life; but he brought in his two little girls,
veiled in pink cotton chadurs. They were eight and nine
years old, with pretty demure manners, very solemn. In
spite of so much decorum, however, one of them had
managed to fall off a ladder and scrape her knee; I took them
home with me to dress the wound, and found that they
turned into natural little human girls as they trotted with
their hands in mine through the starlit valley now filled
with damp night smells of earth after the ploughing.
The unshaven man joined us on the way and we discussed
cuckoos, whose voices I had heard in Alamut for the first
time that day.
" It is a useless wicked bird," I said, and told him how it
grows in a strange nest.
" Is that so?" said he. " If your eye is diseased, and you
smear ointment made from the cuckoos* eyes upon it, it
will heal. Allah makes all things useful. This is written
in a book called The Peculiarities of Beasts. It is true. You
can buy it in the bazaar."
We were polite about it; but we neither of us believed the
other. Next morning we left Shutur Khan. We were to
follow the valley to its upper end, to 'Aziz's village of
Gannrud, over the pass northward, and through the
Caspian jungle to the sea.
It was another fine day. I found the Arbab dispensing
judgments at his door: he squatted on the carpet and wrote
on his knee in purple ink, while his villagers waited with a
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