Had these shepherds penetrated his disguise or doubted him? He almost feared so, as he saw a little group of them, clad in their loose blouses and conical caps of black fur, conferring together and watching him as he disappeared over a kotal, a place where the road dipped down.
Sunset and falling darkness—after which it was perilous to travel in such localities—found him at the ruined walls referred to as the abode of the Ghoule, and there in a little clump of wild pistachio trees he took up his quarters for the night, rightly supposing that all natives would sedulously shun a place haunted by such a dreadful demon as the Ghoule Biaban, or Spirit of the Waste—a gigantic and hideous spectre, with a red tail and claws like a syces sickle, who is supposed to haunt all lonely places in Afghanistan and devour any passenger whose evil fortune casts him in his way.
No ghoule came to Robert Wodrow in his sleep, but a delightful dream, which made him long remember the pistachio tope amid the lonely waste—a dream of Ellinor Wellwood!
So powerful, so vivid, was this dream that he almost said to himself was it in sleep she came before him?
He dreamed that she was beside him and imploring his forgiveness, took his hands in her own, and pressed her lips passionately to them. Then her cheek seemed to touch his, and he could feel her soft sweet breath, and her dear eyes looked tenderly into his.
So vivid was that dream that he turned his head on the root of the tree against which it rested, towards the vision, if we may use the term, and then, of course, it vanished, and the light of the African sun streamed between the branches into his eyes.
Robert Wodrow's heart beat hopefully and happily; he felt that he had looked into the face of his other soul, with the assurance that they would one day meet again; and that notwithstanding their separation, and all that had come to pass, they were—perhaps—kindred spirits after all; and that phrase has a deeper signification than most people think. 'It is my solemn belief,' says a recent writer, 'that spirits are wedded before their birth into this world, and that somewhere, perhaps separated by barriers of space and circumstances, there exists for every soul its fellow, its complement, whose imperfections joined to that other's, will make a perfect whole, if only men and women would not so rashly take the counterfeit for the real.'
So Robert Wodrow flattered himself that Ellinor, perhaps in a dream of her own, had somehow come to him in the spirit, a wild and mystic idea; but, as he examined his arms and ammunition before again resuming his journey, he found that there had been perilously near him in the night something as bad, if not worse, than the Ghoule Biaban!
Amid the sandy mud of a runnel that ran not far from the ruined walls there were distinctly traceable the prints of tigers' feet, quite fresh, like the paw-marks of a gigantic cat; so on this night, when he thought that by the influence of superstition he was unusually safe, he had been in more than usual peril!
A few miles more would bring him to Gundamuck, a walled village, twenty-eight miles west of Jellalabad, surrounded by luxuriant wheat-fields and tall groves of sombre cypresses—the place where Yakoub Khan and the ill-fated Cavagnari had signed that treaty of peace which the former had so basely violated; but Gundamuck was a place to be avoided by the fugitive, who kept among the mountains above it, thus having to ford more than one tributary of the Surkh-ab river, and while sighing to think he had still nearly seventy miles to travel on foot before he would hear the sound of a British bugle, he struck manfully into paths which presented themselves here and there, but seemed to be only marked by the tread of beasts of prey.