We stumbled along thus for two or three hours, too tired to say much, the monotony of the dark night varied only by the falling of a mule, or the refusal of a donkey to proceed, till a volley of shots rang out, the bullets whizzing over our heads to the accompaniment of an inferno of barking from watchdogs. We stopped behind a protected hump and shouted to our assailants to desist. These to satisfy themselves of our harmlessness came running down from their village, and finding us what we affirmed--harmless travellers--put us on our way. But we must have missed in the darkness again, for we dragged on hour by hour, always rising gradually and never getting out of, or above, the knolls and hummocks. We seemed to wind round and round these interminable little hills. We had reached that stage where to sit on a mule is almost fatal, for one falls asleep--and off the beast. Most of us had walked some distance, and in the dark stumbled along tired and disgusted. We could see that it wanted but a few hours to morning, and yet, with the hope that pushes a man to foolishness, we went ahead. At last, however, we came to a point where the road definitely turned south--we wanted to go north--and there men and mules alike gave in. The beasts fell about, refusing a sharp, stony rise before us, and, disgusted with everything, we let them lie, loosening and casting off their loads where they stood or fell. The youth was parched, his tongue so swollen that he could not speak, but only grunted, and he, as well as Ahmad Bash Chaush, had been walking some fourteen hours without resting. Not stopping to arrange the loads or collect the nosebags and small gear that lay about, we fell upon the stones of the road, and, from the time we had stopped, during the process of throwing the loads and tying the animals to them, no one had spoken a word--though the process usually demands a great deal of talking. I suppose we slept for a couple of hours or so, when the cold woke us. I was shivering, and chilled through. A morning breeze had risen and blew from the hills above, lowering the temperature by many degrees in a few seconds. The false dawn was just showing in the east, and, with the unthinking simplicity of the land, we sat up and smoked cigarettes in the hope of getting warm. Far away, on the other side of the plain under Bazian, we could see the big grass-fires still blazing, and sighed not a little for some of their warmth. The silence of the early morning was broken only by the swish of the wind through the dry grass, and an occasional rifle shot told of vigilant Kurds in their villages. [Sidenote: REACH A VILLAGE]