For a second he longed to pull
horse and captor with one wrench over the brink to the kindly gulf where
all was quiet.
The bitterest ill-humour possessed this meekest of men. Normally he
would have been afraid, for he was an imaginative being who feared
horrors and had little relish for them. But there is a certain perfect
bad temper which casteth out fear, and this held him in its grip. He
cursed the mountain solitude and he cursed the Bada-Mawidi with awful
directness. Then he chose silence as the easier part, and trudged like
a stolid criminal till, half in a daze of weariness and sleep, he found
that the cavalcade had halted.
The place was the edge of a little tableland where in a hollow among
rocks lay a collection of mud-walled huts. A fire, in spite of the damp
weather, blazed cheerfully in the midst of the clearing. There was
commotion in the huts, every door was opened, and evil-smelling people
poured forth with cries and questions. The leader of the newly arrived
party bowed himself before a short, square man whom we have met before,
and spoke something in his ear. Fazir Khan looked up sharply at Lewis,
then laughed, and spoke something to his men in his own tongue.
Lewis comprehended barely a few words of Chil, the Bada tongue, and he
knew little of the frontier speeches. But to his amazement the chief
addressed him in tolerable, if halting, English.
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