Inhospitality of Sbabristan
abstract convention endanger housekeeping. We bowed to
the more resolute sex. Indeed, we did not mind paying for
our food as we got it, but our nicer feelings were hurt at this
lowering into the realm of commerce of what should have
been left on the higher plane of gifts offered and returned.
When the ladies saw with what a ready grace we parted with
sixpence in exchange for a hen, they too began to feel remorse,
and murmured apologies on the score of poverty.
They were indeed poor, dressed in rags, half of the mountain
sort and half of the jungle. The men wore moccasins on
their feet, and sheepskin caps that gave them a Struwelpeter
appearance, and square capes of felt they call shaulars, tied in
two shoulder knots or with comic stumps of dummy sleeves.
In this tortoise-like casing, the Caspian rain is kept off for hours.
I longed for solitude and peace, and made die most of the
recent argument and my justifiable displeasure to obtain it.
" Women," I said, addressing the landscape in general during
a pause brought about by the payment of our sixpence,
" women are ignorant creatures."
The assembled men, delighted to see the argument shift from
household economics to the so much more obvious field of
masculine superiority, unanimously rushed at the ladies and
shooed them with insults off the roof into their proper kitchens
below.
The valley was now full of loveliness. A last faint sense of
daylight lingered in its lower reaches, beyond the village houses
whose flat roofs, interspersed with trees, climb one above the
other up the slope. Behind the great mountain at our back
the moon was rising, not visible yet, but flooding the sky with
gentle waves of light ever increasing, far, far above our heads.
Here was more than beauty. We were remote, as in a place
closed by high barriers from the world. No map had yet
printed its name for the eyes of strangers. A sense of quiet
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