"
I said naught, but took Kurban Sahib's glasses from his greasy hands and
cleaned them with a silk handkerchief and returned them to their case.
Sikander Khan told me that he had been the first man in the Zenab valley
to use glasses--whereby he finished two blood-feuds cleanly in the course
of three months' leave. But he was otherwise a liar.
That day Kurban Sahib, with some ten troopers, was sent on to spy the land
for our camp. The _Durro Muts_ moved slowly at that time. They were
weighted with grain and forage and carts, and they greatly wished to leave
these all in some town and go on light to other business which pressed. So
Kurban Sahib sought a short cut for them, a little off the line of march.
We were twelve miles before the main body, and we came to a house under a
high bushed hill, with a nullah, which they call a donga, behind it, and
an old sangar of piled stones, which they call a kraal, before it. Two
thorn bushes grew on either side of the door, like babul bushes, covered
with a golden coloured bloom, and the roof was all of thatch. Before the
house was a valley of stones that rose to another bush-covered hill. There
was an old man in the verandah--an old man with a white beard and a wart
upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine
and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding.
His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his
nostrils were eaten away by a disease.
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