But the rascal took very good care to say nothing about having turned him away from the gate that very night. The man was dead, and therefore he himself was safe. But the offender was happily ignorant of the fateful consequences that rebuff was destined to entail upon his master, upon others--and, perchance, upon himself. For what they gazed upon here was but a beginning. It was the mark of Murad Afzul. CHAPTER NINE. A LEGACY OF VENGEANCE. The Nawab Mahomed Mushim Khan, commonly known as Mushim Khan, Chief of the Gularzai, was seated beneath the shade of an apricot tope, discussing affairs of state with his brother and vizier, Kuhandil Khan. The hour of prayer was just over, yet here and there a group of belated worshippers was still engaged in the prescribed ceremonial, bowing down, low and oft, in the direction of the Holy City, while others were wending their way towards the gate in the long low mud wall behind which stood the village. Here and there, too, knelt camels, in process of being loaded for a journey, eternally snarling and roaring, as is the way of those cross-grained, hideous, but essentially useful animals, and flocks of black goats and of fat-tailed Persian sheep moved lazily off to their browsing grounds attended by tall, shaggy herdsmen armed with their long-barrelled, sickle-stocked guns--and accompanied by great savage dogs, a match for wolf or panther, and far more dangerous than either to any human being not well armed, who should incur their hostility. Even as Raynier had set forth, there was not anything here of the jewelled gorgeousness and architectural splendour popularly associated with the conventional Nawab, yet it was Mushim Khan's principal and favourite place of abode. It lay in a basin-like hollow. Overhead and around, a grim array of chaotic peaks towered to a considerable height--the slopes lined with cliffs, and strewn with tumbled rocks, representing a vastness of area which the unaccustomed eye took some time to appreciate. Through this valley a small river flowed, having for its outlet a narrow, cliff-hung pass, which was, in fact, the principal access to the great natural amphitheatre.