A shepherd camp
their edge. The mass of Elburz across the valley seemed
smaller now than under its winter snows, but a tiny semi-
glacier still hung in each of its two pockets. On Mount Sat,
to the east of it, snow still lay. A line of white strata running
in a jagged zig-zag across the uninhabited eastern landscape is
called Abraham's Path, where, travelling quite unhistorically
with his ewes before him, their milky dripping udders are
said to have left this enduring sign.
Here the air was thin, the distances were clearer: we were
truly in the hills at last.
In a hollow strewn with boulders, where two or three
springs bubbled out of the ground, we found a master of
flocks and his people, living in summer huts whose low roofs
were made of poplars from Narrnirud in the valley below,
covered with faggots and turf, and whose wall was the hillside
itself, which pushed thick shelves of rock into the rooms.
Three walls of stones loosely piled were built out to make each
dwelling: a boulder made the table, a bit of flat earth the
hearth: and little stone pens surrounded the huts, filled with
trodden sheep dung whose acrid smell, mingled with that of
smoke from household fires, comes not unpleasantly to the
nostril of a mountaineer.
These people lived at Verkh through the winter, and on the
slopes of Chala in the spring. Here to their summer pastures
they brought only the bare necessities of life, and chief among
them the tall four-handled jars of earthenware in which milk,
gently tilted from side to side, is turned with time and patience
into butter. " Dug," or curds, were drying in sacks on the
roofs, which, being not more than about four feet off the
ground, were used as tables from the outside. Dogs and
children and cooking-pots surrounded the little camp, where
everyone stopped, their various activities suspended, to look
with suspicious surprise at our approach.
[281]