I asked what they had done and what information they had obtained since their arrival at this place.  His answer was:  Nothing and none worth mentioning.  The town appeared to be a small one of not much over two thousand inhabitants, all of whom were engaged in agricultural pursuits and in camel-breeding.  The herds of camels, however, they gathered, for the most part were kept at outlying settlements on the farther side of the cone-shaped mountain.  As they were unable to talk the language the only person from whom they could gain knowledge was Harut, who spoke to them in his broken English and told them much what he had told me, namely that the upper mountain was a sacred place that might only be visited by the priests, since any uninitiated person who set foot there came to a bad end.  They had not seen any of these priests in the town, where no form of worship appeared to be practised, but they had observed men driving small numbers of sheep or goats up the flanks of the mountain towards the forest.

Of what went on upon this mountain and who lived there they remained in complete ignorance.  It was a case of stalemate.  Harut would not tell them anything nor could they learn anything for themselves.  He added in a depressed way that the whole business seemed very hopeless, and that he had begun to doubt whether there was any tidings of his lost wife to be gained among the Kendah, White or Black.

Now I repeated to him Marut’s dying words, of which most unhappily I had never heard the end.  These seemed to give him new life since they showed that tidings there was of some sort, if only it could be extracted.  But how might this be done?  How, how?

For a whole week things went on thus.  During this time I recovered my strength completely, except in one particular which reduced me to helplessness.  The place on my thigh where Jana had pinched out a bit of the skin healed up well enough, but the inflammation struck inwards to the nerve of my left leg, where once I had been injured by a lion, with the result that whenever I tried to move I was tortured by pains of a sciatic nature.  So I was obliged to lie still and to content myself with being carried on the bed into a little garden which surrounded the mud-built and white-washed house that had been allotted to us as a dwelling-place.

There I lay hour after hour, staring at the Holy Mount which began to spring from the plain within a few hundred yards of the scattered township.  For a mile or so its slopes were bare except for grass on which sheep and goats were grazed, and a few scattered trees.  Studying the place through glasses I observed that these slopes were crowned by a vertical precipice of what looked like lava rock, which seemed to surround the whole mountain and must have been quite a hundred feet high.  Beyond this precipice, which to all appearance was of an unclimbable nature, began a dense forest of large trees, cedars I thought, clothing it to the very top, that is so far as I could see.