The one exception, the camel-driver, a man who had accompanied Wrexham in 1919, Sadiq by name, was passably honest and trustworthy, and seemed to be a wanderer with no particular relatives. He had, however, sufficient local standing to serve to keep us in touch with the countryside on our way up from Yarkand, and was extremely useful in looking after the camels and the hired men. Both Firoz and Payindah had a good knowledge of the beasts, Firoz having learnt much about them in Palestine, where he had been transport lance _naik_ of his unit. For our journey across the desert we had reduced our kit to a minimum. The main question was water, and for that we had brought special tanks from India of galvanized iron, holding seventeen gallons apiece, two full tanks making the camel-load. We had four camel-loads of water, making one hundred and thirty-six gallons in all, which, considering men alone, would give us rather over five gallons a day for the seven of us for twenty-five days. If we did not find the hills old John Wrexham had written about, we ought to be able to make our way back all right, since the consumption of food and water would automatically lighten the loads of the camels, and heavier stores could be shifted off the other beasts, who by that time would be pretty tucked up. Still, I don’t think any of us feared not finding the hills and the stream or water of sorts. We were all thoroughly convinced that the story was true. The coincidence of Wrexham finding the dead man in the desert tallied too much with the account in his great-great-uncle’s diary for the original story to be an invention. Our main preoccupation was how to get into the country, and the kind of reception we were likely to get. We had also arranged to start with one camel-load of full rations for men, which should last us three weeks easily, or a month if we were very careful, and about one and a half camel-loads of grain and oil for camels, giving starvation ration for about the same period. We were chancing our arm over the matter of food for the camels, and they could not possibly stay anything like that period without water; but within five days of starting we could count on ascertaining whether or not there was any snow mountain in the distance, and if so we could safely risk giving part of our water to the camels. If nothing whatever was seen after six days, we should, of course, have to consider the question of returning.