“Look, sahib, those be surely hills in front!”
I looked, and there was a rift in the cloud-bank that had baffled us all day, and in it showed hills, real, unmistakable, blue-shadowed hills, such as one sees from the northern stations of India as you look out over the sunburnt expanse of plain. They were a long way off—forty or fifty miles, I estimated—although in the clean, rain-washed air they looked closer with the sun falling directly upon them. These must be the hills below the high snow we had seen.
“Surely, Payindah, hills like the hills of the Punjab.”
I called to Wrexham breasting the slope ahead with the leading camels:
“Hills, John! Hills ahead!”
He stopped as I called, and then, as my words reached him, he broke into something like a run up the steep slope and stopped. Then I saw his glasses come out. I slithered down the dune I was on, and raced up to him, picking up Forsyth as I went.
The clouds were thinning even as I looked, and presently there stretched before us to right and left a long wall of hills, faint heather colour, below a long veil of clouds.
“‘What I had sought all day in vain, the faint lilae haze below the white that I have noted marks always the lower hills below high snow,’” said Wrexham, quoting from his great-great-uncle’s diary. “We’ve found them, after all! Thank God, we didn’t turn back. I think that rain must have been sent on purpose.”
Wrexham is not what you would call a religious man in the strict sense of the word, but I think—and I know him well—that under his very practical and somewhat materialistic exterior is a very strong belief in a Creator who takes an active interest in His creation. But that was the first time I had ever heard him make such a definite confession of his faith, sure sign of his being deeply moved. We stood in silence a space, and up behind us climbed the camels and stopped, too. Even Sadiq was convinced now, as he stood looking out on the far hills, the first of his people to have faced the desert and seen what lay on the far side.
Forsyth was the first to break the silence.