To this conclusion Major Keeling came reluctantly just as he reached the point from which Alibad could first be seen as he emerged from the hills. The sun had already set, but the desert was lighted up by a gorgeous after-glow, which was equally kind in bringing out the best points of the view and in hiding its defects. Alibad was no longer the cluster of mud huts which its ruler had found it. The white and buff and pink walls of the new houses shone out brilliantly over their screen of young trees, and the dun mass of the fort, with its squat turrets, seemed to brood protectingly above the lower buildings. The native town was a formless blur in the gathering darkness to the left, and on the right, along the line of the temporary canal which supplied the place until the great works already in progress should be completed, were blots and splashes of green, marking the patches of irrigated land where cultivation was in full swing. The programme which Major Keeling had drawn up when he came to Khemistan was in process of realisation, and that very fact chained him to the soil. He had not allowed Penelope to see how much he was tempted to undertake the mission she had proposed to him. It was the kind of thing that appealed to him most strongly--to throw off the burden of routine, have done with office-work, and plunge into the desert, where his hand would be against every man’s, and his life would depend alternately on his sword and his tongue. The proposal fascinated him even now; but before him lay the town which was at once the sign and the result of his labours. He shook the reins, roused Miani from a blissful contemplation of nothing, and trotted briskly home across the plain, followed by Ismail Bakhsh.