Pleasure of travel
an open fire. At the other end of the room, where there was
another dais for the men, the peace overtures were being made.
"Aziz was accepting them with a haughty condescension quite
remarkable in the mild little good-natured man. The room
had no windows, but round holes about a foot in diameter
here and there: glass is not known in these hills. The inner
room, into which the family retire when the winter cold really
begins, had no window at all, but an earthenware oven let
down below the level of the floor, which they fill with embers
and cover with a quilt and sit there with their legs tucked into
the warmth and nothing to do but talk the winter through.
In spite of various dark sayings about the danger from Ah
Ilahis, I refused to sleep indoors, and had my bed put up near
the cows and mules in the moonlight. There I retired, after
an evening of conversation with an old man called Said
Ibrahim, who came to distract my attention from the dis-
courtesy of our host and to discuss Persian history. He told
me that the plain of Kalar still belongs to its peasant owners,
and is more contented than the lands of Kujur and Khurram-
abad east and west, whose lord is the Shah. He was a charming
old man, with that interest in life and affairs which distinguishes
the hillman or tribesman from the peasant, and learning was to
him a real divinity, however small may have been the crumbs
thereof which could be gathered in Kalar Dasht. If I were
asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of
the greatest among them—that so often and so unexpectedly
you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise
and often with a most improbable background, you come, with
a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered
in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of im-
material things., fair blossoms found in every climate, on every
soil.
We were made late next morning by my anxiety to buy
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