“I wonder if there is anything up the valley which I ought to know about?” Captain Phillips said to himself, and he rode forward now with a watchful eye.  The hills began to close in; the bosom of the valley to narrow.  Nine miles from Kohara it became a defile through which the river roared between low precipitous cliffs.  Above the cliffs on each side a level of stony ground, which here and there had been cleared and cultivated, stretched to the mountain walls.  At one point a great fan of debris spread out from a side valley.  Across this fan the track mounted, and then once more the valley widened out.  On the river’s edge a roofless ruin of a building, with a garden run wild at one end of it, stood apart.  A few hundred yards beyond there was a village buried among bushes, and then a deep nullah cut clean across the valley.  It was a lonely and a desolate spot.  Yet Captain Phillips never rode across the fan of shale and came within sight of it but his imagination began to people it with living figures and a surge of wild events.  He reined in his horse as he came to the brow of the hill, and sat for a moment looking downwards.  Then he rode very quickly a few yards down the hill.  Before, he and his horse had been standing out clear against the sky.  Now, against the background of grey and brown he would be an unnoticeable figure.

He halted again, but this time his eyes, instead of roving over the valley, were fixed intently upon one particular spot.  Under the wall of the great ruined building he had seen something move.  He made sure now of what the something was.  There were half a dozen horses—­no, seven—­seven horses tethered apart from each other, and not a syce for any one of them.  Captain Phillips felt his blood quicken.  The Khan’s protestations and Dadu’s startled question, had primed him to expectation.  Cautiously he rode down into the valley, and suspense grew upon him as he rode.  It was a still, windless day, and noise carried far.  The only sound he heard was the sound of the stones rattling under the hoofs of his horse.  But in a little while he reached turf and level ground and so rode forward in silence.  When he was within a couple of hundred yards of the ruin he halted and tied up his horse in a grove of trees.  Thence he walked across an open space, passed beneath the remnant of a gateway into a court and, crossing the court, threaded his way through a network of narrow alleys between crumbling mud walls.  As he advanced the sound of a voice reached his ears—­a deep monotonous voice, which spoke with a kind of rhythm.  The words Phillips could not distinguish, but there was no need that he should.  The intonation, the flow of the sentences, told him clearly enough that somewhere beyond was a man praying.  And then he stopped, for other voices broke suddenly in with loud and, as it seemed to Phillips, with fierce appeals.  But the appeals died away, the one voice again took up the prayer, and again Phillips stepped forward.