It was not without a sombre interest, to explore the warehouses and find that all the huge crates filled with sewingmachines and china and glass and billiard-balls, that had been discharged there, all came from Germany. . . . There was one cart, piled from end to end with ivory, brought by a British ship from British possessions, that was going to be reshipped to Germany, there to be made into billiard-balls and resold to us.

Ivory and apes and peacocks. . . . Here was the ivory, here, too, the silly peacocks strutting in security; there were the sedulous apes who have beaten us at our own game of seafaring and merchant-adventuring.

...

To this has London River come, to this has British shipping come, and at this it will remain as long as Germany subsidises her merchant fleet so that they can take lower freights than the ships of any other nation, and as long as our only way of meeting the menace is by allowing murderous deck cargoes and raising the Plimsoll mark. Has the

war, that has failed in all else, done any lasting good to our merchant marine ? Does the

public, do those in authority recognise more truly than they did that it is the merchant service, which in old days was the navy, from which the present navy evolved, which holds the seas of the world for us during peace as it kept it during the war? The merchantmen feed us, clothe us, bring us our drugs and our jewels and our extras of life, as well as our necessities (and who shall say in modern life exactly where the one begins and the other ends?) Our very breakfast-tables are furnished by reason of the merchant service, and we sit at them all incurious, and complain if the tea is not to our liking or the sugar is still too dear.

London River is not only the peaceful end of the voyage to the merchantmen who dock there. It is, as well, the respite from ceaseless care and responsibility, the temporary end to dangers such as landsmen would think out of all reason and seamen accept as a matter of course; a blessed hiatus in continual stress, an oasis in a desert of storms and worries. Not a sailor enters that loved river without a lifting of the heart, though he returns to an ungrateful country that recognises him not. Such is the charm and danger of England! And everything that has gone to make her the irrational, beloved, annoying, beautiful country that she is, may be found in that most characteristic manifestation of her-London River.

in his pride of orthodoxy, would tell you that they have been Mussalmans from the beginning-of Arab origin, descended from Hazrat Ali himself through one Kutb Shah, who came to India in the tail of Mahmud of Ghazni. But the relics of Hinduism still preserved in their tribal customs show that story to be a palpable yarn, for you will find the Awans still actually employing Brahmans as their family priests. Perhaps, as some would have it, they were Bactrian Greeks driven south from Balkh by Tartar hordes long before the days of Islam; and it is true that the regular features of a young Awan will sometimes call to mind the Greek god of popular fiction. Perhaps, as others again will tell you, they were an Aryan tribe which came up from the South to conquer and occupy their present home. Or perhaps but who can tell? In a country where the original Aryan conquerors were followed by Scythian and Persian, Greek, Parthian, and Hun; where wave after wave of Moslem invasion has swept by-Ghaznavi,Ghori, Moghul, Persian again, Durani, sometimes to be placated by gifts of hawk and hound, but oftener to leave a desert in their wake, after the manner of Feroz Shah Khili, to take one instance only, whose boast it was that he had "made the blood flow in Janjua,1 so that a boat might have glided

within the hills of Jud,”—in such a welter what hope is there of tracing the true origin and history of any particular tribe! But as we know him to-day the Awan is a loyal servant of the Crown, a good yeoman-farmer, and a soldier second to none in the Indian Army. Though an immaculate milk-and-water citizen he emphatically is not; in his home circle, feuds, vendettas, robbery, and violence are as the breath of his nostrils, and he values human life no more than a straw.

Gamoo, on the other handBahadur's satellite-had no pretensions to being an aristocrat. He was a Musalli-of the lower strata of Indian society, where you find living in successive layers the menials who perform such offices as that of blacksmith, leather-worker, scavenger, and the like. Your man of this type is often a born hunter; for his forebearshanging on the fringes of the community-have been driven from time immemorial to eke out a precarious livelihood by catching wild beasts of all sorts and sizes for their daily bread.

And Gamoo turned out to be the best tracker whom I have ever known. To watch a Gond tracking a buffalo or buffalo or a bison through the parched May jungles, a Khanjar spooring a wild boar, or a hillman following a bear, each in its way is an education; but to watch Gamoo as he

Now do not imagine for one moment that I propose to divulge the whereabouts of the happy hunting-ground to which Bahadur led me. No: this is not a sportsman's guide. And I like to think that there is perhaps some grandson of the White Ram there in the old haunts still. Then some day I shall summon Bahadur and Gamoo to me, "souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me," and we three shall sally forth again "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

But stay, this much I shall do for you. As you doubtless know, in the year of grace 630 A.D. a Chinese pilgrim came to visit the Buddhist shrines in this part of the world. And, on his return to China, Hsüan Tsang-for that was our pilgrim's name-compiled a remarkably complete tourist's guide to Northern India, with bearings and distances in li all carefully noted. So here are your sailing directions à la Hsüan Tsang. According to According to my reckoning, the White Ram's ancestral home bears precisely 120 li S.S.W. from the tank of Elaptra the Dragon King, which was, of course, one of the Four Great Treasures visited by Hsüan Tsang; so, once you

can make up your mind as to where the Dragon King kept his tank, the rest will be plain sailing, won't it?

But let me try to describe to you the country in which the White Ram lived. The predominant feature in it is the river-the spinal column, as it were, or vital marrow of the whole,-a river running a shallow trickle in a wide bed of sand and gravel, and readily fordable except in time of flood. But beware of it in a spate, or just after its waters have subsided, for its quicksands are no respecters of persons, and have been known to suck down a Viceroy's elephant before to-day. On either bank are low-lying strips of rich alluvial soil, narrow ribbons of cultivation dotted with wells and tiny dhoks-the homesteads of the cultivators. Behind the cultivation, again, rise two opposing walls of grey stony bluffs-everywhere steep, but often scarped in sheer precipices. And stretching thence far back into the hinterland a perfect maze of ravines run, narrow sheer-sided cañons where they find their way out through the bluffs, but-as you follow them inland-dividing and subdividing and ramificating in every direction till the whole surface of the country for many miles is seamed and scarred with a wild confusion of lanes and furrows, all below the general surface of the ground. Here and there the ravines open out into great quarry-like depressions, perhaps

half a mile in width, often with an island in the centre, its summit flush with the surrounding plain. Stand out in the plain above, and you will never suspect what a network of nalas surround you. The plain looks to be an open undulating glacis sloping gently to the river from the distant hills, but it is, in fact, a regular labyrinth, a subterranean mountain-system of limestone cliffs, steep grey shale-slopes, sandstone ridges, and bluffs of dusky - red nodular marl—all hewn out by the action of the rain.

A hard naked land it is, too, girdled by far-off ranges of even harder and more naked hills; and the stunted patchy scrub of acacias and wild olives and dark-green lustrous sanatha seems only to intensify its nakedness. But it has a fascination all its own-a fascination given only to the breezy, open, waste spaces of the earth. And every here and there you happen on an unsuspected streamlet deep-set in a sunken glen, its banks ablaze perhaps with the wonderful pink-andwhite blossoms of the oleander -a fairyland of close green turf decked out with pigmy forests of bog-myrtle and wild pomegranate and tamarisk. It is then that you appreciate the feelings of the Emperor Akbar at the sight of just such a green oasis in the wilderness only a few miles from the place of which I write. He was on his way to Kashmir, so the story runs, through the parched

grey plains of early summer, when all at once he came on running water and a vista of pure delight. And his monosyllabic cry of joy has become history, for the place has been known as "Wah" ever since that day. Not much of a beauty - spot perhaps only a spring, some green turf, and a neglected orchard. But, then, beauty is so largely a matter of contrast after all; the oftsung Persian garden would look a very poor affair against the background of a Kentish countryside in May.

Such, then, was the country in which our oorial lived: not big or difficult country such as that in which you stalk a markhor or an ibex, but gruelling going, and ground that afforded unlimited scope for hide-and-seek. There, in the seclusion of the ravines, they spent their days, often disturbed by passing goatherds or grass-cutters, but yet contriving in some miraculous way to slip unseen from place to place. There of a morning and an evening they would emerge to feed on the coarse grass of the glades in the thorn-scrub. And sometimes, very early or very late, you might see them

shadowy figures in the twilight-as they revelled in an outlying field of young green corn.

My first expedition saw me within an ace of getting the White Ram. S and I had taken our Christmas leave together, and we began by working the country inland from