sunstroke in the natural oven of that awful valley at mid-day seemed but the prelude to being frost-bitten on the mountain at midnight.  Subedar-Major Mir Daoud Khan Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan appeared wholly unaffected by the 100 deg. variation in temperature, but then he had a few odd stone of comfortable fat and was bred to such climatic trifles.  He, moreover, knew not fever, and, unlike me, had not experienced dysentery, malaria, enteric and pneumonia fairly recently.

“And had the hand of your brother anything to do with the little drops of water that made Ibrahim the Weeper so blind?” I asked.

“Something, Sahib,” replied Mir Daoud Khan with a laugh, “but the hand of Allah had more than that of my brother.  It is a strange story.  True stories are sometimes far stranger than those of the bazaar tale-tellers whose trade it is to invent or remember wondrous tales and stories, myths, and legends.”

“We have a proverb to that effect, Mir Saheb.  Let us sit in the shelter of this rock and you shall tell me the story.  Our eyes can work while tongue and ear play—­or would you sleep?”

“Nahin, Sahib!  Am I a Sahib that I should regard night as the time wholly sacred to sleep and day as the time when to sleep is sin?  I will tell the Sahib the tale of the Blindness of Ibrahim Mahmud the Weeper, well knowing that he, a truth-speaker, will believe the truth spoken by his servant.  To no liar would it seem possible.

“Know then, Sahib, that this brother of mine was not my mother’s son, though the son of my father (Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan Mir Faquir Mahommed Afzul Khan), who was the youngest son of His Highness the Jam Saheb of Mekran Kot in Kubristan.  And he, my father, was a great traveller, a restless wanderer, and crossed the Black Water many times.  To Englistan he went, and without crossing water he also went to the capital of the Amir of Russia to say certain things, quietly, from the King of Islam, the Amir of Afghanistan.  To where the big Waler horses come from he also went, and to where they take the camels for use in the hot and sandy northern parts.”

“Yes, Australia” I remarked.

“Without doubt, if the Sahib be pleased to say it.  And there, having taken many camels in a ship that he might sell them at a profit, he wedded a white woman—­a woman of the race of the Highland soldiers of Englistan, such as are in this very Brigade.”

“Married a Scotchwoman?”

“Without doubt.  Of a low caste—­her father being a drunkard and landless (though grandson of a Lord Sahib), living by horses and camels menially, out-casted, a jail-bird.  Formerly he had carried the mail through the desert, a fine rider and brave man, but sharab[1] had loosened the thigh in the saddle and palsied hand and eye.  On hearing this news, the Jam Saheb was exceeding wroth, for he had planned a good marriage for his son, and he arranged that the woman should die if my father, on whom be Peace, brought her to Mekran Kot.  ’Tis but desert and mountain, Sahib, with a few big jagirs[2] and some villages, a good fort, a crumbling tower, and a town on the Caravan Road—­but the Jam Saheb’s words are clearly heard and for many miles.