ange similar brotherly greetings
with the mirza and the mudbake.

After duly refreshing and invigorating ourselves with sundry bowls of
doke, the inevitable tomasha is given, and the chief asks the khan to get
me to ride up before one row of tents and down the other for the
edification of the women and children, curious groups of whom are
gathered at every door. The ground between the two long, even rows of
tents resembles a macadam boulevard for width and smoothness, and I give
the wild Eimuck tribes-people a ten minutes' exhibition of circling,
speeding, and riding with hands off handles. A strange and novel
experience, surely, this latest triumph of high Western civilization,
invading the isolated nomad camp on the Dasht-i-na-oomid and disporting
for the amusement of the women and children. Some of the women are
attired in quite fanciful colors; Turkish pantaloons of bright blue and
jackets of equally bright red render them highly picturesque, and they
wear a profusion of bead necklaces and the multifarious gewgaws of
semi-civilization. The younger girls wear nose-rings of silver in the
left nostril, with a cluster of tiny beads or stones decorating the side
of the nose. The wrists of most of the men are adorned with bracelets of
plain copper wire about the size of ordinary telegraph wire; they average
large and well-proportioned, and seem intellectually superior to the
Eliautes. A very striking peculiarity of the people in this particular
camp is a sort of lisping, hissing accent to their speech. When first
addressed by the chief, I fancied it simply an individual case of
lisping; but every person in the camp does likewise. Another peculiarity
of expression, that, while not peculiar to this particular camp, is made
striking by reason of its novelty to me at this time, the use of the
expression "O" as a term of assent, in lieu of the Persian "balli." The
sowars, from their proximity to the frontier, have sometimes used this
expression, but here, in the Eimuck camp, I come suddenly upon a people
who use it to the total exclusion of the Persian word. The change from
the "balli sahib" of the Tabbas villagers to the "O, O, O" of the Afghan
nomads is novel and entertaining in the extreme, and I sit and listen
with no small interest to the edifying conversation of the khan, the
mirza, and the mudbake on the one side, and the Eimuck chieftain and
prominent members of the tribe on the other.

Standing behind the chief, who