The fat little officer in his smart uniform sat outside most of the day, smoking with Oriental listlessness or playing with his little fat boy, a miniature counterpart of himself, dressed in uniform with a toy sword.
On some of the merchandise rafts the kalekjis were accompanied by their families. The sacks were piled up to form a rough shelter, under which the women and children crouched all day and cooked their masters' food. More rafts joined on to us further down, until we numbered thirteen. All day we floated in and out amongst each other, the rafts twisting and turning with the vagaries of the current. The kalekjis yelled and shouted at one another; they raced for the fast bits of current ahead where only one raft could pass at a time; they jostled one another or got entangled in shallow places, and the other rafts passed them with jeers.
Our little kalekji put forth all his skill.
"See, Pasha," he would say, excitedly, "see how we leave them behind! You have the best kalekji; do you see I always have the best of the river? Yah, yah, yah," and he roared derisive laughter at his pursuers.
At night we all moored together and the kalekjis would land and sleep in the caves under overhanging rocks, or light a fire on the banks and stretch themselves out round it, taking turns at the night watch.
No sooner was the raft drawn up along the banks than X and I would land to get as much exercise as possible in the remaining hour of daylight. The Zaptiehs, who were obliged to accompany us, wrung their hands over this display of energy.
"Amān, amān. These English have strange habits. They land all in a minute, and before you know what they are doing one has rushed in one direction and one in another, and perhaps both are lost in the darkness, and we have orders from the Government never to lose sight of them. If the Government only knew what they were asking!"
The first evening after leaving Jezireh, Ali and I climbed to the highest point near the river, from where I obtained a good view of the surrounding country. The top of the hill on which we stood was a mass of stones and bulbous plants with withered leaves and tufts of rough grass. The country stretched away all round in strong, firm undulations to a distant horizon. To the west was the full glory of an Eastern sunset, intensifying the reddish hue of the rolling hills until they merged into blackness in the shadows. To the east the terminating range was snow-clad, and the setting sun, casting a pink glow over the white peaks, gave a gradation of colour which caused them to melt imperceptibly into the sky and mingle with the pale reflection of the sun's setting rays on the opposite horizon. What villages, what life lay concealed in the hollows of these rolling hills I do not know. To the eye there was nothing visible but the hill-tops in their naked immensity and intense desolation; on one side the flaming colours of the setting sun, on the other its pale reflection on the snowy peaks, and over it all the vast, inscrutable sky. We were alone, Ali and I, with "that silence which some call God." I liked Ali's companionship on these evening walks; his nature, truly Eastern, was in keeping with the country. He had been chatting away merrily all the way up, trying to teach me Turkish words; and now we both lapsed of one accord into silence and his merry face took on something of the sternness of the surroundings. He laid his rifle on the ground, and moving away a little distance, went through the evening prayer. Now upright, now bending, now on his knees, a misty black form in the dazzling red light, he murmured inaudibly the prescribed words, words which at that same hour were being uttered alike by so many thousands in the fevered rush of busy towns, on the house-tops, and in the crowded chambers. A form, a ritual of empty words this prayer may be, but up here, in Nature's loneliness, the prayer and the man seemed strangely relevant.
Was it not in such a place as this, alone with the great forces of Nature, that Mahomet formed his conception of God as an Irresistible Power?
"Has there come to thee the story of the overwhelming?" he cries out at one time, and again: "Does there not come in man a portion of time when he is nothing worth mentioning?"