talian
through the muleteer and awaited refreshment. They approved of the
brandy highly, they finished it, and towards dawn warmed to song. They
did not sing badly, singing in chorus, but it appeared to Amanda
that the hour might have been better chosen. In the morning they were
agreeably surprised to find one of the Englishmen was an Englishwoman,
and followed every accessible detail of her toilette with great
interest. They were quite helpful about breakfast when the trouble was
put to them; two vanished over a crest and reappeared with some sour
milk, a slabby kind of bread, goat's cheese young but hardened, and
coffee and the means of making coffee, and they joined spiritedly in the
ensuing meal. It ought to have been extraordinarily good fun, this camp
under the vast heavens and these wild visitors, but it was not such fun
as it ought to have been because both Amanda and Benham were extremely
cold, stiff, sleepy, grubby and cross, and when at last they were back
in the way to Podgoritza and had parted, after some present-giving
from their chance friends, they halted in a sunlit grassy place, rolled
themselves up in their blankets and recovered their arrears of sleep.

Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, those oriental
substitutes for hotels, and it was a deceptively good khan, indeed it
was not a khan at all, it was an inn; it provided meals, it had a kind
of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, it possessed an
upper floor with rooms, separate rooms, opening on to a gallery. The
room had no beds but it had a shelf about it on which Amanda and Benham
rolled up in their blankets and slept. "We can do this sort of thing all
right," said Amanda and Benham. "But we mustn't lose the way again."

"In Scutari," said Benham, "we will get an extra horse and a tent."

The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat towards
the dawn of the next day....

The extra horse involved the addition of its owner, a small suspicious
Latin Christian, to the company, and of another horse for him and
an ugly almost hairless boy attendant. Moreover the British consul
prevailed with Benham to accept the services of a picturesque Arnaut
CAVASSE, complete with a rifle, knives, and other implements and the
name of Giorgio. And as they got up into the highlands beyond Scutari
they began to realize the deceitfulness of Podgoritza and the real truth
about khans. Their next one they reached after a rain