"How now about Khedar Khan and his riches, O Saleh Mohammed the Incorruptible?" laughed the Toorkoman.
"Dare you mock me?" asked the Dooranee, scowling, with his hand on a pistol.
"No; but what means all this change since yesterday?"
"It means that what is good for me may be bad for you? Who can read the book of destiny? The same flower which gives a sweet to the bee gives poison to reptiles?"
"Does all this mean that you will neither sell nor barter?" asked Zoolficar, shaking haughtily his huge turban and white heron's plume.
"Exactly—that I will do neither," replied the Dooranee, with a mocking laugh.
"Then, by the hand of the Prophet, there perhaps come those who may deprive you of all you possess!" exclaimed the young Toorkoman, with fierce triumph, as he pointed suddenly along the road that led towards the Akrobat Pass.
The sun, now in the west, was shedding a lovely golden light along the brilliantly green slopes of the mighty mountains, whose snow-capped peaks stood up sharply defined, cold and white, against the deep, pure blue of the sky. The barren and desolate Akrobat Pass, overhung by rocks of slate and limestone, yawned like a dark fissure between the masses of the impending hills, and out of it a cloud of white dust was now seen to roll, spreading like mist, and increasing in magnitude like the vapour released by the fisherman in the Arabian story from the vase of yellow copper on the seashore.
On and on it came—onward and downward into the plain where the Bameean river winds, and where the silent city of the Colossi towers upon its rock-hewn hill.
Bright points began to flash and gleam ever and and anon out of this coming cloud of dust—points that could not be mistaken by a soldier's eye,—and speedily the whole advancing mass assumed the undoubted aspect of a great body of armed horsemen, whose tall spears shone like stars, as they came on at full speed from the mountains!