As he put out the light and we settled down to sleep, I also felt that it would want more than a year or so to explore. Indeed, I was beginning to think that even the matter of Aryenis would require a lifetime. She is so intensely vivid, and has a knack of hanging about your mind and popping up at odd moments just when you’re trying to go to sleep, or lazily contemplating the smoke of your pipe. And once Aryenis did slide into your mental vision--well, everything else seemed to slide out. The desert and the camels and the long road back through Kashgaria, the hills and the high passes, got dimmer and dimmer in perspective, and the Bombay or Karachi docks refused to be visualized at all when Aryenis’s eyes and her mouth and her red-gold hair entered--as of right--into what up till then I had always considered as _my_ mind. CHAPTER XIV WE VISIT THE BORDER We slept late next morning, and I was awakened by the men moving in our room. Dressing hurriedly, we went into the dining-hall to find Kyrlos and Stephnos. Aryenis was evidently enjoying to the full the delights of a real bed in a real house once more. We made a short meal, for the Sakae live much as do the Southern Europeans--a light meal of bread and wine, with perhaps eggs the first thing in the morning, and a large breakfast at noon. I must say I longed for tea or some other suitable morning drink. Alcohol at that hour savoured too much of the rum with which we used to lace our cocoa for dawn battle stunts in the bad frozen frontier days to have any pleasant memories. Kyrlos asked us how we had slept, and if we had all we wanted. We said we were more than comfortable in a good bed--their beds were good--after many weeks of hard marching. Firoz and Payindah were feeding with the soldiers, so we told Kyrlos of their prejudices in the matter of pork, and he said he would give orders on the point. The Punjabis hit it off very well with the Sakae, whose mode of life was not unlike their own in many respects. In time they picked up some of the language with that facility which characterizes the people of India, accustomed all their lives to meeting men of different races. Some folk are of the idea that the inhabitants of India are one people, which may account for a lot of the idealistic rubbish we hear about the Indian nation. One might as well talk of the European nation. There is far more difference between the Punjabi and the Tamil than there is between the Russian and the Englishman, while the French are more akin to the Scotch than are the Mahrattas to the Sikhs. One meets more variety of languages, customs, religions, and, most of all, races, in India than in traversing Europe from Moscow to Dublin. I asked where all the others had gone, and Kyrlos told me that they had ridden out to the villages to see the levies, and would be back with reports in the evening.