But the old imam, who owns and appears to live in this garden, turned the water one early morning into the channels. He must have known that it would deluge our tent. He might have warned us to surround it with a shallow trench. I took revenge by cutting a trench to the lake. The wizened old thing did not display the smallest resentment. They say he is mad. He sits in the garden all day long, smoking cigarettes of his own manufacture, muttering to himself, his eyes fixed upon the lake. When night arrives he goes to sleep in the grass. He has never worked; but nobody works. The idea of work is not repugnant; it is simply an idea which they do not possess. Man is here a shadow--a mournful presence. And the women appear conscious of some immense and inexpiable sin. The children are seldom gay; you never hear laughter. Their poor little naked bodies are burnt brown by the sun, and their stomachs are distended by indifferent food. Each morning we bathe in the lake. The water is delicious to the skin, bracing and at the same time soft. A certain soapiness in its composition produces a cleansing effect; yet to the eye it is transparent as crystal. Swimming out into deep water, the thermometer registered 68°, or exactly the temperature of the shade at 6.30 A.M. The rocky shore shelves down with a measure of abruptness, so that in breezy weather the waves do not break until they reach the ledge. The bather is soon across this fringe of surf. And the colouring of the water! Riding early to the ruins, or returning towards sunset to our camp, it is always a new effect, or a fresh and startling combination, differing from anything either of us have seen elsewhere. When the surface of the expanse is ruffled, the restless, sparkling water is at once intensely green and intensely blue; an aquamarine so vivid that it must be overpowering, an ultramarine so deep that it may not yield. Twilight lasts but a little time; yet the brief space is many times multiplied by the number and variety of dissolving tints. The landscape of sea and mountain is overtaken by complete stillness. The lake becomes the colour of an iridescent opal, green, blue, and pearly white. The mountains are lightly tinged with delicate yellows and warm greys, faintly shaded in the recesses of the chain of peaks.