He turned the beast and rode straight at the thicket, which was a very little one.  The ball had wandered somewhere into the void, and no harm was done, but he was curious about its owner.  Up on the hillside he seemed to see a dark figure scrambling among the cliffs in the fretted moonlight.

It is unpleasant to be shot at in the dark from the wayside, but at the moment the thing pleased this strange young man.  It seemed a token that at last he was getting to work.  He found a rope stretched taut across the road, which accounted for the pony’s stumble.  Laughing heartily, he cut it with his knife, and continued, cheerful as before, but somewhat less fantastic.  Now he kept a sharp eye on all wayside patches.

At the head of the valley the waters of the stream forked into two torrents, one flowing from the east in an open glen up which ran the road to Yarkand, the other descending from the northern hills in a wild gully.  At the foot stood a little hut with an apology for stabling, where an old and dirty gentleman of the Hunza race pursued his calling till such time as he should attract the notice of his friends up in the hills and go to paradise with a slit throat.

Lewis roused the man with a violent knocking at the door.  The old ruffian appeared with a sputtering lamp which might have belonged to a cave man, and a head of matted grey hair which suggested the same origin.  He was old and suspicious, but at Lewis’s bidding he hobbled forth and pointed out the stabling.

“The pony is to stay here till it is called for.  Do you hear?  And if Holm Sahib returns and finds that it is not fed he will pay you nothing.  So good night, father.  Sound sleep and a good conscience.”

He turned to the twisting hill road which ran up from the light into the gloom of the cleft with all the vigour of an old mountaineer who has been long forced to dwell among lowlands.  Once a man acquires the art of hill walking he will always find flat country something of a burden, and the mere ascent of a slope will have a tonic’s power.  The path was good, but perilous at the best, and the proximity of yawning precipices gave a zest to the travel.  The road would fringe a pit of shade, black but for the gleam of mica and the scattered foam of the stream.  It was no longer a silent world.  Hawks screamed at times from the cliffs, and a multitude of bats and owls flickered in the depths.  A continuous falling of waters, an infinite sighing of night winds, the swaying and tossing which is always heard in the midmost mountain solitudes, the crumbling of hill gravel and the bleat of a goat on some hill-side, all made a cheerful accompaniment to the scraping of his boots on the rocky road.