From Kusshalgar we were travelling in a tonga once more. The landscape was all of steep hills without vegetation; stretches of sand, hills of clay—lilac or rosy brick-earth scorched in the sun, green or brown earth where there had been recent landslips, baked by the summer heat to every shade of red. There was one hill higher than the rest, of a velvety rose-colour with very gentle undulations, and then a river-bed full of snowy-white sand, which was salt.

And from every stone, and in the rifts in the rocks, hung stalactites, like glittering icicles, and these too were of salt.

There was always the same torture of the horses, too small and too lean for their work, galloping the five miles of ............