At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative

by John Alfred Gray

Suddenly, I saw the Armenian pause a second—he was riding a steady old mountain pony—glance up to the road above and put his horse straight up the slope. There was a scramble, a scatter of sparks, as the hoofs struck the rock, and he was up on the road. I saw why, when he was gone, and my turn came. The path ended: rounding off into nothing. There was no room to turn back, nor to dismount; I could not stay where I was, and I put him at rocky slope. The horse looked up: a little touch of the spur, and I grasped his mane with both hands: he reared straight up, gave a spring from his hind legs, and in a moment was on the slope. I lived a long time in the next few seconds, for it flashed into me that, if we ever got up, the crush on the road above would leave no room for us, and we must inevitably slip back. But, no! he scrambled like a cat, and darting into a gap in the stream of baggage-horses, we were safe on the path. I hoped I didn’t look very sickly: I felt so. Presently, we were able to escape from the stream of traffic by riding along a narrow ridge, then we descended a horribly steep slope. This, however, was earthy and stony, not bare rock, and it afforded a firmer foothold: the bay went down sideways, like a crab. In the place where we scrambled up, the rock was rough and somewhat irregular. If it had been smooth, this probably would never have been written.

Then we got on to a wide road in a valley; presently there was another block, and the Armenian turned off the road to the right. I shouted angrily,

“Look here! I am not going along any more of your infernal paths. I would rather sit in a block for an hour: we are not in such a tremendous hurry.”

He called back, “Sir! he is all right here.”

The ground was broken-up by huge cracks, seven or eight yards wide! A man rode out from the crush and looked, then turned his horse back and re-entered the crowded road. Away across the broken-up plain we could see a road running along the foot of a mountain. It was not very crowded, and, after all, we were not on a mountain with only bare rock under foot, so we went for it. Scrambling down the cracks or miniature ravines, some fourteen or fifteen feet deep, we waded, or rather rode, through pools of water, and scrambled up the other side. I don’t know how many we climbed into and out of—but a good many. The Armenian’s horse, though a good mountain-climber, was afraid of water, and he refused and shied, but had to go. When he was plunging the Armenian’s turban tumbled off into a pool, but he fished it out and clapped it on his head again, wet, and cursed his horse in Persian.

At last we got on to the road at the foot of the mountain, and went some distance; but it became excessively stony and rough.

The Armenian said, “He is become worse, you go further.”

We, therefore, branched off to the left from the road, and found ourselves in a marshy valley. In the mountains, on the left, I saw the openings of several caves, and there were waterfalls tumbling down the rocks. This valley was infested with tigers, but there were too many people about, and too much noise for that to be a danger.