Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, those oriental substitutes for hotels, and it was a deceptively good khan, indeed it was not a khan at all, it was an inn; it provided meals, it had a kind of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, it possessed an upper floor with rooms, separate rooms, opening on to a gallery.  The room had no beds but it had a shelf about it on which Amanda and Benham rolled up in their blankets and slept.  “We can do this sort of thing all right,” said Amanda and Benham.  “But we mustn’t lose the way again.”

“In Scutari,” said Benham, “we will get an extra horse and a tent.”

The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat towards the dawn of the next day. . . .

The extra horse involved the addition of its owner, a small suspicious Latin Christian, to the company, and of another horse for him and an ugly almost hairless boy attendant.  Moreover the British consul prevailed with Benham to accept the services of a picturesque Arnaut cavasse, complete with a rifle, knives, and other implements and the name of Giorgio.  And as they got up into the highlands beyond Scutari they began to realize the deceitfulness of Podgoritza and the real truth about khans.  Their next one they reached after a rainy evening, and it was a cavernous room with a floor of indurated mud and full of eye-stinging wood-smoke and wind and the smell of beasts, unpartitioned, with a weakly hostile custodian from whom no food could be got but a little goat’s flesh and bread.  The meat Giorgio stuck upon a skewer in gobbets like cats-meat and cooked before the fire.  For drink there was coffee and raw spirits.  Against the wall in one corner was a slab of wood rather like the draining board in a scullery, and on this the guests were expected to sleep.  The horses and the rest of the party camped loosely about the adjacent corner after a bitter dispute upon some unknown point between the horse owner and the custodian.

Amanda and Benham were already rolled up on their slanting board like a couple of chrysalids when other company began to arrive through the open door out of the moonlight, drawn thither by the report of a travelling Englishwoman.

They were sturdy men in light coloured garments adorned ostentatiously with weapons, they moved mysteriously about in the firelit darknesses and conversed in undertones with Giorgio.  Giorgio seemed to have considerable powers of exposition and a gift for social organization.  Presently he came to Benham and explained that raki was available and that hospitality would do no harm; Benham and Amanda sat up and various romantic figures with splendid moustaches came forward and shook hands with him, modestly ignoring Amanda.  There was drinking, in which Benham shared, incomprehensible compliments, much ineffective saying of “BUONA Notte,” and at last Amanda and Benham counterfeited sleep.  This seemed to remove a check on the