THE ROAD TO FORZA

The road ran in a straight line through the valley of dry rocks, a dull, modern road, engineered and macadamized up to the edge of the hills.  The click of hoofs raised echoes in the silence, for in all the great valley, in the chain of pools in the channel, the acres of sun-dried stone, the granite rocks, the tangle of mountain scrub, there seemed no life of bird or beast.  It was a strange, deathly stillness, and overhead the purple sky, sown with a million globes of light, seemed so near and imminent that the glen for the moment was but a vast jewel-lit cavern, and the sky a fretted roof which spanned the mountains.

For the first time Lewis felt the East.  Hitherto he had been unable to see anything in his errand but its futility.  A stupider man, with a sharp, practical brain, would have taken himself seriously and come to Bardur with an intent and satisfied mind.  He would have assumed the air of a diplomatist, have felt the dignity of his mission, and in success and failure have borne himself with self-confidence.  But to Lewis the business which loomed serious in England, at Bardur took on the colour of comedy.  He felt his impotence, he was touched insensibly by the easy content of the place.  Frontier difficulties seemed matters for romance and comic opera; and Bardur resolved itself into an English suburb, all tea-parties and tennis.  But at times an austere conscience jogged him to remembrance, and in one such fitful craving for action and enterprise he had found this errand.  Now at last, astride the little Kashmir pony, with his face to the polestar and the hills, he felt the mystery of a strange world, and his work assumed a tinge of the adventurer.  This was new, he told himself; this was romance.  He had his eyes turned to a new land, and the smell of dry mountain sand and scrub, and the vault-like, imperial sky were the earnest of his inheritance.  This was the East, the gorgeous, the impenetrable.  Before him were the hill deserts, and then the great, warm plains, and the wide rivers, and then on and on to the cold north, the steppes, the icy streams, the untrodden forests.  To the west and beyond the mountains were holy mosques, “shady cities of palm trees,” great walled towns to which north and west and south brought their merchandise.  And to the east were latitudes more wonderful, the uplands of the world, the impassable borders of the oldest of human cultures.  Names rang in his head like tunes—­Khiva, Bokhara, Samarkand, the goal of many boyish dreams born of clandestine suppers and the Arabian Nights.  It was an old fierce world he was on the brink of, and the nervous frontier civilization fell a thousand miles behind him.

The white road turned to the right with the valley, and the hills crept down to the distance of a gun-shot.  The mounting tiers of stone and brawling water caught the moonlight in waves, and now he was in a cold pit of shadow and now in a patch of radiant moonshine.  It was a world of fantasy, a rousing world of wintry hill winds and sudden gleams of summer.  His spirits rose high, and he forgot all else in plain enjoyment.  Now at last he had found life, rich, wild, girt with marvels.  He was beginning to whistle some air when his pony shied violently and fell back, and at the same moment a pistol-shot cracked out of a patch of thorn.