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Major Alan Hawke silently ran over his slender professional accomplishments. "I'm not too heavy to ride yet. I've a fair hand at cards tough nerves, and even a bit of staying power. Luck may turn my way yet and there's always the Pamirs! At the worst, the Russians the Afghans, or those fellows up in Sikkim and Hill Tipperah! An artillerist is always welcome there!"

It would be hard luck if that uneasy State were to wake again into turmoil while he was kept kicking his heels at Chatham. "Yes, there is trouble," Shere Ali replied. "But it is not the kind of trouble which will help you forward with the Road." The trouble, indeed, was of quite another kind. The Russians were not stirring behind the Hindu Kush or on the Pamirs.

Tommy, with an abstracted eye, talked of Alexander and Timour and Genghis Khan, and particularly of Prester John, who was a character and took his fancy. I had told him that the natives in the Pamirs were true Persian stock, and this interested him greatly. 'Why was there never a great state built up in those valleys? he asked.

Face to face now with his half formed resolution of suicide, the wasted past slowly unrolled itself before him. The brief days of his service in India, an abrupt exit from the service, long years of wandering in Japan and China, as a gentleman adventurer, and all the singular phases of a nomadic life in Burmah, Nepaul, Cashmere, Bhootan, and the Pamirs.

Hsüan Chuang says that he was carried off in captivity by a king who reigned somewhere in the east of the Pamirs and that he, Aśvaghosha, Nâgârjuna and Deva were styled the four shining suns. Asanga and Vasubandhu were brothers, sons of a Brahman who lived at Peshawar.

"Good people, but far too few for a serious row, and just sufficiently large to have time hang on their hands. Our friends the Bada-Mawidi now and then wake them up. I see from the Temps that a great stirring of the tribes in the Southern Pamirs is reported. I expect that news came overland through Russia.

He belongs to the Punyal family, and is Wazir or governor of Sai and Gor. He lives at Damot, a village in the Sai valley, opposite Bunji, and it was during my stay there that I first got to know him. He has an interesting history, and, among other adventures, has travelled through the Pamirs and Chitral in disguise.

The mention of the Indian frontier brought us back to our professions, and for a little we talked "shop" with the unblushing confidence of those who know each other's work and approve it. As a very young soldier Thirlstone had gone shooting in the Pamirs, and had blundered into a Russian party of exploration which contained Kuropatkin.

He often debated the question with the savants aboard the Ark, and, despite their incredulity, he persisted in his opinion. He could not be shaken, either, in his belief that the first land to emerge would be the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and the plateau of Tibet.

If he does not despise a glass of vodka, opportunity offered, he may have a good deal to say to me; for ten years he has been on the Transcaspian between Uzun Ada and the Pamirs, and during the last month he has been all along the line to Pekin. I call him No. 7 in my notebook, and I hope he will give me information enough.