Griffiths came back with the dinghy and my rifle, bringing a spare one on the chance that I would let him have a day’s sport too. I let him come, and away inland we started, the head-man, Jaffa (with my shot-gun), and myself leading, followed by Webster, his two marines, and Griffiths, surrounded by a dirty, happy mob of natives, armed with short, clumsy hunting spears, some only with boat’s paddles. Innumerable children followed, shrieking with delight, and a dozen or more women, hooded so that we could only see their eyes, bearing vessels of water—big earthenware chatties—on their heads, brought up the rear of the expedition. If I had had any idea whatever of treachery the fact of the women coming along would have dispelled that. We were just as safe as if we had been going shooting among a lot of country people in England. Directly we had reached the limits of cultivation the children were sent back very quickly. No leopard could have slept comfortably within a mile of the noise they made. Then we commenced to wind up a track towards the mountains themselves, and the nearer we came to them the more rugged and barren they looked. Very nearly black they were in places; great rents split whole shoulders from the main ridge; huge masses of rock were poised on each other like vast columns, looking as though a bird perching on them would upset them. Indeed the slope we were ascending was so strewn with gigantic blocks of black rock that one knew that they, at one time, must have fallen from just such columns. The head-man began talking volubly to Jaffa, and he, turning to me, said: "Leopards there—come down at night—go back sleep close by." I told Jaffa that whatever happened I must be back by sunset. The old man understood and nodded—so we pushed on. It was very hot work scrambling up that vast, debris-strewn slope, over smooth rocks which gave scarcely any foothold, twisting round great boulders or half-wading through loose sand, worn from the face of some steep, precipitous part by countless years of exposure—everything too hot to put one’s hands on comfortably, and the sun always scorching on one’s back. I called a halt long before the old head-man had begun to show the slightest sign of fatigue. I looked back. My three marines and Griffiths were some way below us, among the admiring villagers, wiping their perspiring faces. Lower down was the little group of women crouching together, with their water chatties in front of them; a thousand feet below, beyond the dark, green fringe of mangrove trees, the _Bunder Abbas_ lay in that inland basin, and, winding out like a dark snake, the channel wriggled through the cliffs to the sea. The blazing sun poured down relentlessly from a cloudless sky. Jaffa touched my arm, pointing out to sea and to a faintly-showing trail of smoke. Unslinging my glasses, I followed the line of smoke till I saw a steamer. It was the _Intrepid_, evidently making for this same harbour.