The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron Page A

again.
    Yesterday Christopher gave our host a two-toman note to change. This morning Abbas, who took the change, refused to give it up. “Are you a thief?” asked Christopher. “Yes I am”, he replied. He then complained bitterly of the insult, said he had 1000 tomans in hispocket, and in the same breath asked how he could live without a present now and then. Our relations with him, already cool enough, were further strained when he tried to steal the money we paid for the loan of a house to lunch in. He raised his whip against the owner, an old man, and would have struck him if I had not ridden them apart and called Abbas the son of a burnt father.
    It was thus humiliating to discover, as we were riding by a salt stream through a lonely breathless valley, that Christopher had lost his wallet with our money in it; for we are now entirely dependent on Abbas to beg shelter for us gratis. At the moment he was behind, having said he must visit an outlying village, and we suspected that having found the wallet, he had absconded for good. A few minutes later he rejoined us. We explained our predicament. He triumphed slightly, but has sent back one of the muleteers to look for the wallet.
    As a slight compensation, we have been most hospitably received here by the steward of some local magnate, and are now reclining beside a sweet-smelling fire over a game of two-handed bridge. There is comfort in the simmering of the samovar. Pray God the muleteer has been successful—he has just come in. No he hasn’t; in fact he hasn’t started yet, and now wants Haji Baba to go with him, at the price of a toman each. I have given them two out of my remaining twelve, and here we are in the middle of Azerbaijan with just over a pound to get us back to Teheran.
    Later
.—Christopher has found the wallet buttoned in his shirt. It is too late to stop the muleteers, but we have given Abbas two to mans to make up for our suspicions, unspoken though they were.
    Ak Bulagh
(c. 5500
ft
.),
October 20th
—Christopher was ill when he woke up, from the fleas. Seeing this, the stewardbrought him a cone of black honey and said that if he ate this for four days, at the same time abstaining from curds and rogand, the rancid butter in which everything is cooked, the fleas would avoid him as they do me. While we breakfasted by the fire off milk and eggs, a boy of some fourteen years old walked in attended by an old man and a train of servants. This, it appeared, was the squire, to whom we owed so much good food and attention, and the old man was his uncle. His name is Mohammad Ali Khan, and our host of tonight describes him as “the lord of all the villages”.
    The muleteers walked twenty miles in the night, to the village where we lunched, and back. They were as active as usual today, perhaps more so, having had no opium.
    One farsakh brought us to Saraskand, a village-town dignified by an old brick tea-house. Here we bought some grapes at a shop which also sold Bavarian pencils, steel nibs, and chintz. In the afternoon we came to Dash Bulagh, and rested by a stream to contemplate the little cluster of grey mud houses, the conical towers overspread with drying dung, and the tall white stems of golden-green trees against the bare rose-tinted hills.
    Ak Bulagh is higher and very exposed; one stunted, wind-blown tree is all its shelter. The sun has set behind the twin peaks. By lantern-light in our squalid windowless room I have been sponging Christopher with cold water, as the flea-bites have given him fever; in fact some are so raw that we have put whisky on them, in lieu of any other disinfectant. Fortunately he is not too ill to repay the headman’s courtesies:
    â€œPeace to you.”
    â€œPeace to you.”
    â€œThe condition of Your Highness is good, God willing?”
    â€œThanks be to God, owing to the kindness of Your Excellency, it is very good.”
    â€œEverything Your Highness commands your