o the other end of nowhere.

A line of camels, strung together like a grotesque living necklace,
sauntered past, led by a loose-robed Pathan, as supercilious of aspect
as the shuffling brutes who bobbed and gurgled in his wake. Or it
might be a group of bullock-carts going down to Kushalghur, to meet
consignments of stores and all the minor necessaries of life,--for in
those days Kohat was innocent of shops. At rare intervals, colourless
mud hamlets--each with its warlike watch-tower--huddled close to the
road as if for company and protection. Here the monotonous round of
life was already astir. Women of a remarkable height and grace, in
dark-blue draperies peculiar to the Frontier, went about their work
with superb movement of untrammelled limbs, and groups of shiny bronze
babies shrilled to the heartsome notes of the tonga-horn. There were also
whitewashed police _chokhis_,[3] where blue-coated, yellow-trousered
policemen squatted, and smoked, and spat, in glorious idleness, from dawn
to dusk, and exchanged full-flavoured compliments with the Pathan driver
in passing. For the rest there was always the passionless serenity of the
desert, with its crop of thriftless thorn-bushes, whose berries showed
like blood-drops pricked from the hard heart of the land; and beyond the
desert, looming steadily nearer with every mile of progress, the rugged
majesty of the hills.

[3] Police stations.

As the third hour of their journeying drew to an end, a sudden vision
of green, like an emerald dropped on the drab face of the plain,
brought a flush to Honor's cheeks, a light into her eyes.

"It is Kohat, Miss Sahib," the driver announced with a comprehensive
wave of his hand.

A breath of ice-cool air came to her from an open watercourse at the
roadside, and the fragrance of a hundred roses from the one beautiful
garden in the station that surrounded the Deputy-Commissioner's house.
They passed for a while between overarching trees, but the glimpse of
Eden was short-lived. At the avenue's end they came abruptly into the
cantonment itself: stony, barren, unlovely, the dead level broken here
and there by rounded hummocks unworthy to be called hills. On the
east, behind a protective mud-wall, lay the native city; on the north
and west, the bungalows of the little garrison--flat-roofed,
square-shouldered buildings, with lizard-haunted slits of windows
fifteen feet above the ground, set in the midst of bare, pebble-strewn
compounds;