And so, here I am within a hundred and sixty miles of Meshed again.  More than a month has flown past since I last looked back upon its golden dome; it has been an eventful month.  My experiences have been exceptional and instructive, but I ought now to be enjoying the comforts of the English camp at Quetta, instead of halting overnight in the mud huts of the surly Sooltan of Karize.

The female portion of Karize society make no pretence of covering up their faces, which impresses me the more as I have seen precious little of female faces since entering Afghanistan.  All the women of Karize are ugly; a fact that I attribute to the handsomest specimens being carried off to Bokhara, for decades past, by the Turkomans.  The people that assemble to gaze upon me are the same sore-eyed crowd that characterizes most Persian villages; and among them is one man totally blind.  The loss of sight has not dimmed his inquisitiveness any, however; nothing could do that, and he gets someone to lead him into my room, where he makes an exhaustive examination of the bicycle with his hands.

A village luti entertains me during the evening with a dancing deer; a comical affair of wood, made to dance on a table by jerking a string.  The luti plays a sort of “whangadoodle” tune on a guitar, and manipulates the string so as to make the deer keep time to the tune.  He tells me he obtained it from Hindostan.

Among the wiseacres gathered around me plying questions, is one who asks, “Chand menzils inja to London?” He wants to know how many marches, or stopping-places, there are between Karize and London.  This is a fair illustration of what these people think the world is like.  His idea of a journey from here to London is that of stages across a desert country like Persia from one caravanserai to another; beyond that conception these people know nothing.  London, they think, would be some such place as Herat or Meshed.

At the hour of my departure from Karize, on the following morning, a little old man presents himself, and wants me to employ him as an escort.  The old fellow is a shrivelled-up little bit of a man, whom I could well-nigh hold out at arm’s length and lift up with one hand.  Not feeling the need of either guide or guard particularly, I decline the old fellow’s services “with thanks,” and push on; happy, in fact, to find myself once more untrammelled by native company.

Small towers of refuge, dotting the plain thickly about Karize, tell of past depredations by the Turkomans.  An outlying village like Karize must, indeed, have had a hard struggle for existence; right in the heart of the daman country, too.  For miles the plain is found to be grassy as the Western prairies; an innovation from the dreary gray of the camel-thorn dasht that is quite refreshing.  A stream or two has to be forded, and many Afghans are met returning from pilgrimage to Meshed.