thought differently and enforced their opinion by thrusts of a poisoned weapon, which ended Ali's life in the year 661 A.D. His saintly reputation lived and grew, and these, our chance companions of the caravan trail, were lamenting his demise, as all good Shiïtes do and have done, for to ! these centuries gone. But their grief is controllable. Its expression lasts just so many minutes, and, as I remembered when the spell of sympathy was broken, is rhythmic, more cadenced even than the rudely musical lu-lu which the black women in Africa chant in misfortune's hour.
The recovery of spirits takes place automatically as soon as the wailing is ended. Our combined cavalcade set off as merrily as if Ali had never lived or had never died.
Our speedy march soon left the cheerful mourners far to the rear. We hastened on, dodging past the slow caravans of commerce, meeting here the tins of Caspian kerosene which once we saw in far Baku, giving the courtesy of the road to a native governor or what-not, whose escort swarmed the trail and whose invisible wife rode for hours on end, silent and stiff in her litter. We chatted (you may imagine chatting through Achbar) with coolies who pack dried fruits two hundred miles or more across the Himalayas, fifty pounds, pig-a-back ; we talked with a golf-stockinged, English-speaking, joke-loving native Commissioner, fresh from Kipling's pages,. who proposed a drink and mystified Anginieur by calling it a "peg," and then we crossed the Zoji Pass, thus ending all hardship and dropping into fair Kashmir. This pass is not quite twelve thousand feet high,
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