new, he told himself; this was romance. He had his eyes turned to a new
land, and the smell of dry mountain sand and scrub, and the vault-like,
imperial sky were the earnest of his inheritance. This was the East,
the gorgeous, the impenetrable. Before him were the hill deserts, and
then the great, warm plains, and the wide rivers, and then on and on to
the cold north, the steppes, the icy streams, the untrodden forests. To
the west and beyond the mountains were holy mosques, "shady cities of
palm trees," great walled towns to which north and west and south
brought their merchandise. And to the east were latitudes more
wonderful, the uplands of the world, the impassable borders of the
oldest of human cultures. Names rang in his head like tunes--Khiva,
Bokhara, Samarkand, the goal of many boyish dreams born of clandestine
suppers and the Arabian Nights. It was an old fierce world he was on
the brink of, and the nervous frontier civilization fell a thousand
miles behind him.

The white road turned to the right with the valley, and the hills crept
down to the distance of a gun-shot. The mounting tiers of stone and
brawling water caught the moonlight in waves, and now he was in a cold
pit of shadow and now in a patch of radiant moonshine. It was a world
of fantasy, a rousing world of wintry hill winds and sudden gleams of
summer. His spirits rose high, and he forgot all else in plain
enjoyment. Now at last he had found life, rich, wild, girt with
marvels. He was beginning to whistle some air when his pony shied
violently and fell back, and at the same moment a pistol-shot cracked
out of a patch of thorn.

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