The Throne of Solomon
world after all: the man had gone to look for food along the
road. We provided him with what we could, including
quinine, and retired to sleep widi a more cheerful feeling ahout
the world in general. The Milky Way, the " Road of God,"
lay like a lid to our box of a valley, with stars thick as a field oi
daisies round it. Mosquitoes hummed in the sticky warmth.
I decided to leave the Chalus as soon as I could next morning,
and find a healthier and less depressing way home across higher
ground.
The Squire of Bijeno
We found the first sign of habitation at Tuvir next morning,
after one hour's ride in die dawn.
A roadside chaikhana was giving breakfast to travellers, our
own sick friend of the night before having passed along there in
the earliest hours. We took in a new store of bread and turned
westward uphill towards Tuvir village, which is well above
the road in groves of trees. We climbed up by a rough path
where steps had been laid here and there, made of carved slabs
from graves such as those seen round the Imamzadeh the day
before.
The Chalus here is one of those steep sunken valleys which
open to comparatively flat ledges high up, where villages and
fields spread themselves out of sight of the world below. The
path we now took led us from one to the other of these villages
along the western side, through woody lanes of beech and oak
and thorn, with hidden brooks that might have been in Eng-
land; and a trailing wet mist came down upon us, hiding the
distance, but giving more than ever a pleasant homelike feeling
to the brambles and drooping wet grasses among the boulders.
The villages that we passed were inhabited almost exclusively
by women, the men having gone higher up with the flocks.
Tuvir, Qutir, Meres, we passed: from here there is Kandichal,
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