seeing a Kirghiz catch an eagle for this purpose by riding it down. When I first saw the man starting off to gallop down an eagle, I thought he must be mad. We had seen two eagles on the ground in the distance, and as soon as the Kirghiz caught sight of them he set off wildly after them. They, of course, rose on seeing him, but he went careering down the valley after one of them till gradually the bird sank down to the ground. It was, in fact, gorged with the flesh of the carcase it had been feeding on, and could no longer fly. The Kirghiz dismounted, seized hold of the bird, bound his waist-cloth round and round the body and wings till he had made it up into a neat parcel, and then tucked it under his arm, mounted, and rode back to me. He said that, if it turned out to be a good one for hawking, he might get two hundred rupees for it. I questioned the owner of the eagle in the tent in which we were now staying about the training of these eagles, but he was too surly to give me any satisfactory answers, and it was with no very grateful feelings towards him that we left his camp on the following morning.
We travelled hard all day, and, at the end of a march of forty-six miles, over a country mostly composed of bare hills and gravel plains, but with occasional clumps of trees in the hollows, we reached a wide plain of light clay, in the middle of which we found a very large encampment of fully a hundred tents. But the inhabitants were far from friendly, and it wars only after considerable difficulty that a man was found who was willing to put us up. Rahmat-ula-Khan was very tactful and persuasive, but he told me that night that the people were very badly disposed towards us, and advised me to be watchful.
Next morning matters were worse. As I mounted to ride away, crowds of these rough Kirghiz collected round me, gesticulating wildly. I asked Rahmat-ula-Khan what was the matter, and he said that they had determined
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