The colonel produces a bottle of excellent Shiraz wine and a box of Russian cigarettes.  The ladies have become sufficiently Orientalized to number among their accomplishments the smoking of cigarettes.  They are delighted at meeting us, and are already acquainted with the main circumstances of my misadventure in Afghanistan.  Camp-stools are brought out, and we spend a most pleasant hour together, before continuing on our opposite courses.  The wondering natives are almost speechless with astonishment at the spectacle of the two ladies sitting out there, faces all uncovered, smoking cigarettes, sipping claret, and chatting freely with the men.  It is a regular circus-day for these poor, unenlightened mortals.  The ladies are charming, and the charm of female society loses nothing, the reader may be sure, from one’s having been deprived of it for a matter of months.

The colonel’s lingual preference is German, Mrs. G------’s, French, and
the daughter’s, English; so that we are quite cosmopolitan in the matter
of speech.  All of us know enough Persian to express ourselves in that
language too.  In commenting upon my detention by the Afghans, the colonel
characterizes them as “pedar sheitans,” Madame as “le diable Afghans,”
and Miss G------as well, “le diable” in plain yet charmingly broken
English.

The next day, soon after noon, we roll into Shahrood, where B------
discharges his fourgon and we engage mules to transport us over the Tash
Pass, a breakneck bridle-trail over the Elburz range to the Asterabad
Plain and the Caspian.

A half-day search by Abdul results in the employment of an outfit comprising three charvadars, with three mules, a couple of donkeys, and riding horses for ourselves.  A liberal use of the whip by R on the charvadars’ shoulders, awful threats, and sundry other persuasive arguments, assist very materially in getting started at a decent hour on the morning following our arrival.  The bicycle is taken apart and placed on top of the mule-packs, where, in remembrance of its former fate under somewhat similar conditions, I keep it pretty strictly under surveillance.

The Asterabad trail is a steady ascent from the beginning; and before many miles are covered, scattering dwarf pines on the, mountains indicate a change from the utter barrenness that characterizes their southern aspect.  One lone tree of quite respectable dimensions, standing a mile or so off to our left, suggests a special point of demarcation between utter barrenness and where a new order of things begins.

Our way leads up fearful rocky paths, where the horses have to be led, and at times assisted; up, up, until our elevation is nearly ten thousand feet, and we are among a chaotic wilderness of precipitous rocks and scrub pines.  A false step in some places, and our horses would roll down among the craggy rocks for hundreds of feet.  It is a toilsome march, but we cross the Tash Pass, camp for the night in a little inter-mountain valley, beside a stream at the foot of a pine-covered mountain.  The change from the interior plains is already novel and refreshing.  Grass abounds abundance, and the prospect is the greenest I have seen for nine months.  We camp out in the open, and are put to some discomfort by passing showers in the night.