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through every orack oranny, our first flow of reminiscences was exhausted and we had time to turn our attention to the daily papers that we each had brought.

Mine was the 'Pioneer.' But there happened to be remarkably little news that day, and I began to feel distinotly bored with it. However, just as I had finished the telegrams and leading articles, my eye was caught by a headline referring to the recent discovery of oil in Baluchistan. Now oil is such a vital commodity these days that none can help feeling vaguely interested in it; so I read the paragraph carefully. It was highly technical and left me little the wiser; but I gathered that the district where the oil had been found lay on the Makran Coast in Southern Baluchistan, about midway between Karachi and the Persian border.

"I don't know much about the oil," said Elkington in answer to a question of mine, but they tell me that it is no good. The whole formation. is volcanio, you see, and the strata is so broken up that the oil has leaked away. But I was out in those parts this winter, so let's hear what the 'Pioneer' has got to say."

"Here you are then," I said, "just see what you can make of this." And I read him the following extract:

"The oil-fields in question lie in the Malan Hills, not far from the Arabian Sea coast. Gaseous hydrocar

bons would appear to have
gathered in a
in a state of
pressure along buried anti-
clines underlying the imper-
meable clays. For, at
different points, these gases
have forced their way
through fissures in the olays
-to form remarkable mud-
volcanoes. It is claimed
that liquid hydrocarbons
(petroleum) must also exist
in large quantities, for the
gases are continually dis-
charged from the voleano
craters, accompanied by an
unceasing flow of liquid mud
and brine. Indeed, during
paroxysmal eruptions, these
gases have been known spon-
taneously to ignite. . . .'

"By Jove, they have," Judy interrupted somewhat foreibly. "I've had more than enough of mud-volcanoes.”

"But why this heat?" said I. "I was under the impression that a mud-volcano was the sort of creature a child might play with. You don't mean to say that you were rash enough to fall into one?"

"No, I wasn't ass enough to fall in, but I was precious near being pushed. The yarn has nothing to do with oil; but perhaps I had better inflict it on you, just in case you should still think I was in any way to blame."

"A little something with a spice of Canterbury Tale about it, to beguile the weary hours? That sounds delightful. Commencez dono, monsieur, s'il vous plait."

"Last autumn, then," Judy began, "when I came back

from Palestine, I had a couple of months' war-leave due. But England didn't seem to be much of a country to spend them in at the time. So I made up my mind to do another shooting trip. Now I had never shot a Persian ibex -the smooth-horned fellow, you know, and the Makran coast was said to be full of them.

"Makran, too, was a place that I had always wanted to go to. You see, since the beginning of time it has been the great link between India and Western Asia. And there are a lot of things in the country well worth seeing, from an antiquarian point of view; those Shami tombs, for instance, of which no one seems to know the origin. much of the hinterland is still practically unknown.

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And

"On the other hand, of course, I knew Makran to be one of the most poisonous places in the world. For it is nothing but a barren maze of broken hills-as hot as hell, where it rains with luck once a year, and the little water you get is guaranteed to corrode any but indigenous innards. But, after all, my leave was in winter, when the climate any how would be bearable. So finally I decided to go to Makran,

bunderboat isn't built for deep-sea voyaging; it is an open affair for carrying goods inside Karaohi harbour. The winds were contrary, and for five days I lived cheek-byjowl with my Muhammadan crew in no more privacy than that enjoyed by a galleyslave. It was rough, too; you try a bunderboat in an Arabian Sea swell if you want to appreciate what Horace meant by 'inverso mare.'

"We were out of sight of land most of the time. But on the third day we sighted a low range of hills far away on the starboard horizon, the coastal range of Southern Baluohistan. And like enough, that was the very landfall that Nearkos made on his northward voyage, after he and his fleet parted from Alexander by the Indus mouth. As the hills grew clearer and clearer, I allowed my thoughts to wander to the succession of men of many races Assyrian and Greek, Sassanian and Seljuk, Arab and Mongol, and many more, who have thirsted and oursed and died in Makran —before the British came.

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"In the end we reached the mouth of the Hingol river. It is about the only decent river in the country; though there are lots of others that start hopefully in the mountains, only to disappear in the sand long before they reach the sea. We crossed the bar at the mouth without difficulty, and found my camels waiting there A as previously arranged.

"The beginning of December found me setting sail from Karachi in a bunderboat, and shaping my course up the Arabian Sea. I don't want to dwell on that voyage.

1 Syrian.

"With the camels was old Ismal, a local hunter come to offer his services as ghillie. He was a Brahui by tribe-a Muhammadan of course. A picturesque old boy was Ismal, old and shrunken, with flowing white beard and clean-cut Semitic features. His most cherished possession was his prehistorio matchlock jezail— a weapon of dread, and his body was slung round with a perfect armoury of powderhorns, cartridge-belts, and curved daggers. But, old though he was, I never could see the way he went up a hill.

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toiled painfully in rear through this nightmare land.

"A gale was blowing as we landed. Afterwards I came to associate Makran with constant gales,-gales that blew down my tent at night and blew away my bedding; gales that made it impossible at the critical moment to hold the rifle steady for a shot; gales that filled mouth and eyes and nose with dust and grit. In the shadowless glare of noonday the hills loomed flat and unreal through the driving sand and dust-haze-as though fashioned from cardboard.

"On the beach close by was a cluster of matting huts tenanted by long-haired fisherfolk. And it was not difficult to picture these hovels as still harbouring Arrian's Ichthyophagoi-barbarians clothed in skins of fish or animals, covered with long hair and using their nails as we use fish-knives . . . fighting more like monkeys than men.' For such, he tells us, were the forefathers of these fishermen ; the men who opposed Nearkos on that very spot when he touched at the Hingol to draw fresh water to land supplies.

"On the sandy plain between shore and mountains a queer conical white hill gleamed in the sunshine. From his desoriptions I recognised old Chandragup-to give him the name by which the Hindu pilgrims know him. He is one of the largest mud-volcanoes in the world. So I sent my camels on to camp while Ismal

and I made a detour to pay our respects to Chandragup.

"It was a long hot walk to his foot. To reach his orater I climbed laboriously to the top of the cone of dried mud that rises ୫ good three hundred feet above the plain. This orater of his, by the way, is unlike that of an ordinary volcano, in that its contents are flush with the top; in fact, the black viscous mud bulges upwards above the rim like the surface of a brim-full cup of tea. Ever and anon there is a mighty heaving in his bowels, and the liquid mud is thrust up to an accompaniment of sullen gulpings-to sink again 88 soon as the paroxysm is past. Round the crater's rim there runs a narrow slippery path over which the contents are ever spilling during these eruptions - to trickle down the outside of the cone and dry in a crust of glistening brine.

"These hills be Darya Cham,' remarked old Ismal. 'If you take but one little step beyond that path-edge, the black mud will gulp you down for ever.' Then, spitting contemptuously into the crater, he added, "The Hindu pilgrims think that a goddess lives beneath the mud, and, in my father's day, those sonsof-burnt-sires would throw in live boys and girls to make the goddess speak; but now human sacrifice is forbidden, so they have to offer cocoanuts and suchlike trash instead.'

'Goop! Goop! Goop!' mut

tered old Chandragup, in sullen lament over the sorry offerings of a decadent age. I was to meet Chandragup again; but even then I felt that there was something inexpressibly sinister about his black tortured surface, as though some evil spirit were troubling the pool.

"That evening we camped where the Hingol leaves the hills. Next day our camp moved a little farther up the gorge, while Ismal and I went to look for ibex. I shot disgracefully, I remember, and missed a sitting chance at a grand old cream-coloured patriarch, with great curving horns and a dark chocolate saddlemark on his wither. The climbing was poisonous, and I get back to camp thoroughly tired and disgusted.

"I found my tent pitched in the narrow Hinglaj gorge, just below the shrine of Kali. Now this shrine was one of the things that had brought me to Makran, for it is a place with a very queer history. To-day it is held sacred by both Mussulmans and Hindus, though more particularly by the latter; but that is by no means the beginning of the story. For the shrine lies under the hill of Nani Mai, or Mother Nani, and men worshipped at the foot of Mother Nani long ages before the Prophet fled from Mecoa; aye, and even before the IndoAryans first sang their Vedio hymns on their southwards march to Hindostan,

1 The Eyes of the Sea,

Nani

Mai is none other than Nana The Earth, wife of Anu Heaven, first of the Twelve Great Gods of the Assyrians. And she is older even than Assyria; for we know that Nana was worshipped by the Accadians in Chaldea a thousand years before the birth of Abraham,

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"But Mother Nani has fallen on evil times. For to-day her main supporters belong to the Hindu geot of the 'lefthanded' Saktas. Obscene worshippers of Kali these; their bible is the Tantra and their fierce licentious worship is based on unbridled indulgence in the Five Makaras '-to wit, wine, flesh, fish, mystic gesticulations and sexual intercourse. Human sacrifice once formed a common part of their ritual; and the prosaic cocoanut that the pilgrim still presents at the shrine is symbolical of the human head decked with flowers-once the favourite offering of the goddess. To this day, too, you may see shrines where the blood of humbler victims is never allowed to dry upon the sacrificial stone.

"Ismal had assured me that I should find the shrine-gorge a very paradise of verdure. But to my eyes, still unattuned to desert unutterable, it seemed a gloomy unhallowed spot. There were pools of water lying amongst the boulders, it's true; but the sheer walls of rock towered frowning on either hand to a good thousand feet,

"Just before dawn that night I was awakened by the barking of my bull-terrier, 'Jook,'

so I looked out to see what was the matter. Outside I found the gorge in inky blackness, save for its very topmost rim silvered by the level rays of a setting moon, while overhead, incredibly remete, was a narrow strip of starry sky. From the direction of the shrine above, a wild music of chanting and the blaring of a conch came pealing down the gorge: the devotees of Kali were greeting the goddess befere the beginning of another day. It was a scene for the peneil of a Doré; and I thought that it would be hard to find a more appropriate setting for the shrine of the deity whose worshippers picture her as a black fury dripping with blood and hung about with snakes and human skulls-the helpmeet of Siva the Destroyer.

"Bands of Hindu pilgrims from all over India collect periodically to tramp together to the shrine, a weary tramp from Karachi of nearly two hundred miles by desert and mountain. And from the shrine they make an excursion to Chandragup. For, as Ismal told me, they throw offerings into his crater, and hold his answering burblings to be the divine voice of Kali. But between the visits of these bands, Nani Mai is deserted by all save & few hermits who stay as guardians of the shrine, and it was the chanting of those guardians that had disturbed us.

"Next morning, after breakfast, I strolled up to have a chat with them and to see the shrine, taking care to bring a

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