The fakir smiled grimly.
"This dog has his false magic, Sahib, but Muhammed Din knows many magics that are not false. I have sworn."
"Go, then. Allah be with you!"
"And with you, Sahib!"
Muhammed Din salaamed once more, lifted the curtain, and passed out. The Political Officer watched him go across the compound, and then bent down to his work again with a little outbreathing of satisfaction. The Secret Service had no more reliable man than Muhammed Din.
The squalid little village high up in a cleft of the brown and barren hills, that gleamed golden aloft where they cut sharply across the intense blue of the sky, was filled with an uncommon concourse of tribesmen. And yet more were arriving. Down the stony paths which led to the village from the heights, up the boulder-strewn, dried-up stream-bed which afforded the easiest passage from below, the hillmen hurried in little groups—a bearded khan, a modern rifle on his shoulder, his cummerbund stuck full of knives, followed by a ragged rabble of retainers, variously armed. Their weapons were mementoes of generations of rifle-stealing and gun-running. Lee-Enfields, Lee-Metfords, Martinis, Sniders—all were represented. Not a few carried the old-fashioned jezail, the long-barrelled gun with inlaid, curved stock. All had knives.
They swarmed on the rough roadway between the squat stone, windowless houses whose loopholes were eloquent of their owners' outlook on life. They clustered round the stone-parapeted well in the centre of the village, so that the women with the water-pots were richly provided with an excuse for loitering. The clamour of excited voices resounding from the walls was re-echoed at a fiercer shout from the steep, towering hill-sides, stone-terraced near the village into plots of cultivated land.
This was no ordinary assemblage. From far and near the tribesmen swarmed in, and men met face to face whose habitual encounter would have sent both dodging to cover, rifle to the shoulder. The blood-feuds were laid aside. Families that for months had lived in terror of their neighbours across the village street, quitting their domiciles stealthily by the back way when they had occasion to go out, while the sudden rifle-shot of the concealed marksman added steadily to the tale of vendetta victims on both sides, mingled now with the throng, albeit cautiously. Men whose dwellings were a doorless tower which they entered and left by a basket on a rope, who tilled their fields with ever a rifle in their hand, strode now down the street, their dark eyes roving from side to side, and passed their adversaries with scarce a scowl. Mullahs, Koran in hand, their young disciples at their skirts, threaded their way through the crowd, giving and receiving pious salutation, exhorting, preaching, inflaming the fanaticism of passions naturally fierce. The blood-feuds between man and man, village and village, were forgotten in the reawakened, never-extinguished feud between Islam and the infidel. Behind the priests marched men armed to the teeth, their faces working in a frenzy, their eyes inflamed. They were ghazi—wrought up to the pitch of fervour where their own life is a predetermined sacrifice, so that they may first slay an unbeliever, sure of immediate Paradise as their reward.
Above the murmur of voices came the continual drone: