So I slipped off my pony, giving it to the nearest man, and pushed my way through the crowd, who made way for me in silence, looking at me, doubtless wondering who I was. I walked up the steps to where she stood, the deerhounds at her feet, with the throng of servants and soldiers, men and women of all kinds in front, and the little circle of grave-visaged elders and mail-clad officers just above her. “Stand there and let them see you, Harilek; I want them to know you. I’m going on talking.” And on she went. She was evidently telling of her escape now, for the crowd began to cheer, while the men threw their caps into the air and the women shrilled their applause and clapped their hands softly in Sakae fashion. Then suddenly, in her rather dramatic way, she stopped, turned, and pointed to me, standing there like a fool in Paulos’s mail with my bandaged face. After that they mobbed us both, while the old lady nearly wrung my hands off, and I was glad when we got up the stairway to the building. Just as we reached the doors, Aryenis turned on me with eyes suspiciously bright and, I think, slightly moist. “Welcome, Harilek, to the home I’d never have seen again except for you.” And so we entered the wide doors, with Ziné and Milos behind us, and the deerhounds walking on either side of Aryenis trying to lick her hands. CHAPTER XVIII A SHAMAN RAID That afternoon I rode out with Milos to look at some of his men, and as we rode he talked to me about his people and about their wonderful cliff-girt land, for Nature, not content with setting the great desert around Sakaeland, had girdled it further with a precipitous wall of cliff, that now higher, now lower, circles the whole country. There being no incentive to make a way down to the desert, none has ever been made, as doubtless would have happened had the surrounding country been fertile instead of being hundreds of miles of trackless sand-dunes. The Sakae impressed me more and more. They were not unlike Pathans in their free independence, but it was tempered with a certain respect for authority which I have never seen out of England or the countries sprung from her, since it was by no means the servile respect of subject races. As we rode back to the city there was a good deal of traffic coming in--horsemen, bullock-waggons, droves of cattle, and sheep. Between the in and out gates stood a tall, yellow-haired archer on duty directing the stream. He did not shout or gesticulate or beat folk ineffectively after the manner of the East. He just spoke quietly to all, but, whether they were coarse-clad bullock-drivers, or chiefs in mail with mounted retinues, they did exactly as he told them.