It was the wintry
weather which was his own, and Alice's face, framed in a cloak, as he
had seen it at the Broken Bridge, rose in the gallery of his heart. In
a moment he was disillusioned. Success, enterprise, new lands and faces
seemed the most dismal vexation of spirit. With a very bitter heart he
walked home, and, after the fashion of his silent kind, gave no sign of
his mood save by a premature and unreasonable retirement to bed.
CHAPTER XXI
IN THE HEART OF THE HILLS
All around was stone and scrub, rising in terraces to the foot of sheer
cliffs which opened up here and there in nullahs and gave a glimpse of
great snow hills behind them. On one of the flat ridge-tops a little
village of stunted, slaty houses squatted like an ape, with a vigilant
eye on twenty gorges. Thin, twisting paths led up to it, and before, on
the more clement slopes, some fields of grain were tilled as our Aryan
forefathers tilled the soil on the plains of Turkestan. The place was
at least 8,000 feet above the sea, so the air was highland, clear and
pleasant, save for the dryness which the great stone deserts forced upon
the soft south winds. You will not find the place marked in any map,
for it is a little beyond even the most recent geographer's ken, but it
is none the less a highly important place, for the nameless village is
one of the seats of that most active and excellent race of men, the
Bada-Mawidi, who are so old that they can afford to look down on their
neighbours from a vantage-ground of some thousands of years.
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