The youngest girl, a child of fourteen, I had not noticed much before, as she had sat all the time huddled in a heap on the other side of the fire, and the hut was full of smoke. Now she began rocking to and fro, crying, "Oh, my foot, my foot!" Her father explained that a few days before she had upset the caldron of boiling milk over her foot, and that it pained her so that she could not sleep. An old woman from the next hut came in to look at it. The poor girl drew up her skirt and showed the foot swathed in the filthiest handkerchief. I was horrified, jumped up, and hurried round to the wind side of the fire where she lay and there was no smoke and one could see. The people here have enormous faith in the healing power of any stranger, and they were most delighted when I offered to look at the injury. She peeled off the dirty rags. The skin was off the whole instep; it was dressed with mud and grass, and the edges were angry and forming matter. It evidently pained her horribly. She was a plucky little thing, and let me strip off the pudding of mud and matter, clear the place of grass, and dress it with clean handkerchiefs and lanoline. Her skin was very thick and as hard as leather. The fresh dressing relieved her greatly, and as the rain had just lifted I went out to have a look round. For a few minutes the view was incomparably grand. The huge jagged summit of Kom rose up abruptly from the grass not a quarter of a mile away, and stood all bare and lonely, quite white on an angry purple sky, for the fog had frozen upon it. Down below great snakes of mist clung and crawled, and the distant peaks rose one behind the other, violently and vividly blue. It was extraordinarily majestic and as silent as death. Down swept the storm again with a fusillade of chill hail. Even the hut a few yards away was invisible. We struggled back to it, my host remarking, "You will have to stay the night 'kod nas.' If you try to go farther you will be lost on the mountains."