Bertram Mitford
"The Ruby Sword"
"A Romance of Baluchistan"
Chapter One.
The Ghazis.
“We love to roam, the wide world our home,
As the rushing whirlwind free;
O’er sea and land, and foreign strand,
Who would not a wanderer be!
“To the far off scenes of our youthful dreams
With a lightsome heart we go;
On the willing hack, or the charger’s back,
Or the weary camel slow.”
Thus sang the wayfarer to himself as he urged a potentially willing, but certainly very tired hack along the stony, sandy road which wound gradually up the defile; now overhanging a broad, dry watercourse, now threading an expanse of stunted juniper—the whole constituting a most depressing waste, destitute alike of animal, bird—or even insect—life.
The wayfarer sang to keep up his spirits, for the desolation of the surroundings had already begun to get upon his nerves. He was thoroughly tired out, and very thirsty, a combination of discomfort which is apt to get upon one’s temper as well. His steed, a sorry quadruped at best, seemed hardly able to put one leg before another, wearied out with a long day’s march over arid plains, where the sun blazed down as a vast burning-glass upon slabs of rock and mounds of dry soil, streaked white here and there with gypsum—and now the ascent, gradual as it was, of the mountain defile had about finished both horse and rider.