The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for health, profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.
“Be warned and go back!” urged Ismail.
“Come with me, then.”
“Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!”
“I imagine she waits for me!” laughed King. “Forward! We have rested in this place long enough!”
So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,
“Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!” says Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks only of the goal ahead.
It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human habitation within a march because none dare build.
They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the animals could be guided down it.
“Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a third way.