He passed through Jandol and climbed the Lowari Pass among the fir trees and the pines, and on the very summit he met three men clothed in brown homespun with their hair clubbed at the sides of their heads.  Each man carried a rifle on his back and two of them carried swords besides, and they wore sandals of grass upon their feet.  They were talking as they went, and they were talking in the Chilti tongue.  Shere Ali hailed them and bade them stop.

“On what journey are you going?” he asked, and one of the three bowed low and answered him.

“Sir, we are going to Mecca.”

“To Mecca!” exclaimed Shere Ali.  “How will you ever get to Mecca?  Have you money?”

“Sir, we have each six rupees, and with six rupees a man may reach Mecca from Kurrachee.  Till we reach Kurrachee, there is no fear that we shall starve.  Dwellers in the villages will befriend us.”

“Why, that is true,” said Shere Ali, “but since you are countrymen of my own and my father’s subjects, you shall not tax too heavily your friends upon the road.”

He added to their scanty store of rupees, and one after another they thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass.  Shere Ali watched them as they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so much discomfort for their faith.  He watched their dwindling figures and understood how far he was set apart from them.  He was of their faith himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca—?  He shrugged his shoulders at the name.  It meant no more to him than it did to the White People who had cast him out.  But that chance meeting lingered in his memory, and as he travelled northwards, he would wonder at times by night at what village his three countrymen slept and by day whether their faith still cheered them on their road.

He came at last to the borders of Chiltistan, and travelled thenceforward through a country rich with orchards and green rice and golden amaranth.  The terraced slopes of the mountains, ablaze with wild indigo, closed in upon him and widened out.  Above the terraces great dark forests of pines and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the snowfields.  From the villages the people came out to meet him, and here and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a flower, which he touched and remitted.  He was escorted to polo-grounds and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably before him.  There was one evening which he particularly remembered.  He had set up his camp outside a large village and was sitting alone by his fire in the open air.  The night was very still, the sky dark but studded with stars extraordinarily bright—­so