A few weeks later, on the Flushing packet, the steward eyed that baggage dubiously, and opined we should need "two strong porters" to carry it up to the train. At his words there arose in our minds a vision of two grizzled Syrians carrying all that baggage on their shoulders, for three hours, with scarcely a breather, across the face of a precipice which would have made the steward's hair stand on end! As a matter of fact each load (though it certainly looked overwhelming) totalled up to about sixty pounds, which is the load of a porter on the Alps. Half an hour we ascended gradually and slantingly along the face of the mountain; and then the ground vanished from under us with a suddenness which took away our breath. The cliff broke away from our toes sheer down to the river beneath us, a drop (to compute it by guesswork) of something like two thousand feet. It was a grand, if somewhat a dizzy, spectacle; but our guides never checked for an instant. They skipped over the lip of the precipice, and went tripping along a ledge on the face of it, as if they considered such travelling the most ordinary thing in the world. This then was the real "three hours' route" which led from Erdil to Suryi, the path where "horses couldn't go, and mules couldn't go, and Englishmen couldn't walk." With regard to the horses and mules we endorse the description most cordially; but for ordinary capable pedestrians it was not so very terrible after all. True, it looked rather a fly-on-the-wall business when seen from a little distance; but the ledges, if narrow, were firm, and there was generally plenty of hand hold. Moreover the rocks themselves, though they had looked absolutely vertical when seen from below the previous morning, all proved to be more or less sloping and not quite destitute of brushwood; so it is possible one might have recovered oneself even had one slipped from the path. The worst bits were at the beginning and end of our traverse, where the track led over steeply tilted slabs. Here our European nailed boots refused to bite on the surface, and the porters in their hempen brogues got across much more happily than we. These hempen brogues are almost universally worn by the hillmen, and are admirable footwear for rock work; but they need patching every evening to be ready for the journey next day. Even English boots, however, cannot long stand this sort of travelling. Let them be made ever so strongly they are cut to pieces in three months. Half way across the face of the precipice, while pausing to rest a few minutes, we were able by means of our glasses to see our horses coming on behind. They were then just turning into the main valley, having accomplished about half their journey; and though we had given them an hour's start at Erdil, we had fully two hours to wait for them at the mouth of the Oramar gorge. CHAPTER VIII A MASTER OF MISRULE (NERI AND JILU)