As dawn approached I was able to make out these details, and to take my bearings to find the road again should I succeed in getting away. The robbers were all well mounted, and their horses were fat and in good condition. I noted the particulars of each man, but the chief gave me no chance to recognize him. At dawn, as we passed under a high cliff, we heard shots fired, and bullets began to fly about our heads. The horsemen returned the fire, which came from some twenty footmen who were perched in coigns of vantage and under shelter, on the top and face of the cliff. It was now daylight, and the pleasures of being shot at were not increased when I saw that the practice was good, for one of the horsemen now lost a finger. A good deal of shouting took place, but as it was in Turkish, I could not make out its purport. At last they seemed to come to some sort of understanding, for the firing ceased, and the footmen came down from the cliff into the plain. These men were evidently also Bakhtiaris, and were led by a small old man clad in white; he wore zangāl, a kind of leather legging, and had a long, red-dyed beard, and a tall felt hat. From what I overheard, I found out that the second party had outnumbered the first, and that my spoils were to be divided. The difficulty seemed to be about myself. The head of the footmen said: “You have looted this Feringhi; with this we have nothing to do. _We_ loot not him, but you.” The man who had lost his finger now came to have it dressed, which I did as well as I could for him. Instead of being grateful, he merely, in most expressive pantomime, drew his finger across his throat. Upon the principle that dead men tell no tales, it was undoubtedly their intention to put me out of the way. And had we not met the second gang, it would have probably been done where we were, a lonely place, safe from all interruption; but there were now too many witnesses to the fact of my having been carried off. We continued our march, accompanied by the footmen, about thirty men, including ourselves. I found out afterwards that the men who had looted me had only the day before robbed a Syud, or descendant of the prophet, a moollah (or priest), and after stripping him, _as he was a holy man_, and they did not like to kill him in cold blood, they laid him on the ground, piled big stones on him so that he could not stir, and left him to die in the desert of hunger and thirst. His body was found half eaten by jackals, and the men confessed the fact when they had no further reason for denying it. So had there been no second party arriving, I should have fared ill. At about nine A.M. we halted. I was placed in charge of the two footmen armed with iron-headed staves; and the guide, whose hands had remained bound, with the two post-horses and the load of grain, remained guarded by them. The rest of the horsemen and the footmen retired to some three hundred yards off, and commenced to unpack my saddle-bags.