And then he pointed out to me the beauties of the great rushing stream, the vivid colouring of its yellow banks, and the light green of the groves of trees that sprang with a new year’s life far below us. Again he sat silent, and gazed with narrowed eyes at the far mountains, and when he spoke again, it was the soul of the Kurd and of the mountaineer that threw the harsh words of his dialect from his tongue: “God! and God! and God! He, the Indivisible, His glories are manifest to our eyes, and His mercies to our hearts and minds. Yet my son, think not that these mountains--upon which the body roams, while the soul, soaring above, meets the Unknown in a medium pure[7] as the snow-field that stretches above--are His masterpiece. For verily, as these mighty hills are the greatest of His works here, yet they are but as the pebble upon their flanks compared to His works in Heaven. “See this work, how it exists. Who are we to boast of the power He gave us, Who takes it away after our four days of transition? See these city walls, the great among us made them, and they shall fall in a space of time incalculably small in His sight, yet the stones of them are His handiwork, and long enduring, have endured, even as those hills. And when the walls shall sink, one, building the sign of his ambition with the ruin of another’s, shall use these same stones, remembering the former builder of walls. “Ah! that he forget not the Maker of the stones that last, and the hills that endure.” The old man spoke quietly, yet as he spoke, the blue eyes dimmed and the voice shook--indeed there are anomalies in this world, dual personalities, among the sons of the East that one never suspects. This old man, who had spent his life in an occupation we should deride as hypocritical--for he was a guide to Mecca, and while overcharging the uninitiated, achieved spurious merit--had yet in his old heart a spot where the poetry that lives in the Aryan breast yet lurked, and emanated, ascribing everything to that fearful Omnipotence that the Muhammadan worships. In the Persian I have often met this dual personality--the hard, cautious man, who descends to any trickery and deception, even crime, for the meanest ends, and in a revulsion of feeling reviles himself, sees himself as others see him, in the purest poetry of language and thought expresses the most beautiful sentiment, and falls to earth again. [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE] The mountains, always the mountains, held the old man’s gaze. There is a fascination about them that it is not necessary to be a Kurd or a Persian to be able to acquire. The impassive monuments of old-time glacier and volcanic upheaval, relics of convulsions that rent continents, that rise straight up from the flat, broad plains, may well seize upon all that is impressionable in anyone, and inspire the dullest with that craving to penetrate the mysteries of their deep valleys, and view the world from their blanched heads.