It was getting on for midday, and we had nearly reached the wall of hills, which now towered, grim and threatening, above us, a long line of sheer cliff, incredibly high; and, though the face was scarred and furrowed, there seemed to be no place where it could be ascended except in true mountaineering fashion with ropes and other aids. Nor was there any sign of life in all the expanse of bare brown rock that rose before us, not even a wheeling kite in the sky. If life there were ahead, it must lie all on the other side of this great barrier that stretched away on either hand as far as we could see, merging from dead lifeless brown to warmer reds and madders and purples, and then finally to hazy blues as the distance softened the hard outlines. We two were standing on the edge of the sand looking up a short slope of rock, tumbled with big boulders and smaller stones that ended abruptly at the foot of the wall-like cliff. Some half a mile or more behind us our string of camels plodded slowly along over the low sand ripples, here only a foot or two in height. The whole scene rather reminded me of the Derajat--the plain that lies between the Indus and Waziristan--save that the hills here were far more formidable. Behind us, the expanse of yellow sand, not unlike the sun-dried soil below the frontier hills. In front, those frowning walls of rock, and just ahead of me in the white sunlight, Payindah with his short _poshtin_, his loose tied khaki _pagri_ round his bobbed black locks, his baggy khaki breeches and worn _chaplis_, for all the world like any tribal levy man of the Indian border, save that his rifle, even now after the long march, was spotless, and his bandolier had been new-cleaned overnight. Evidently Payindah, like Forsyth, believed in first impressions. Ahead of us, as he said, the little stream--now somewhat wider--ran into the rock wall in a narrow cleft, where it vanished. “Wouldst like to picket the top?” I asked, pointing up. “Wah, what could get up that save a fly?” said he; and, indeed, I think he was about right. It was not often that Payindah admitted that anything was out of his power, for he possessed to the full that boastfulness so characteristic of the Punjabi, a relic, perhaps, of the old Greek strain from Alexander’s time that the Punjab talks of even to this day. Travel along the Punjab frontier, yes, and right down into Baluchistan, and any old ruin, any disused water-channel faced with big stone blocks, any uncommon feature that might be the work of men, and local fable will tell you that it was built by the great Sikandar. “Well, let us push on to the mouth, and then, if we see naught, we will halt the camels here,” said I. We went on forward right up to the mouth of the cleft--a narrow sword-cut such as one meets all along the Indian frontier, but narrower than most, perhaps a bare thirty feet from rock wall to rock wall, with the babbling stream running in the stony bed between.