This we achieved without any undue trouble, the building, like most
"gujar" homes, being constructed on the side of a hill sufficiently steep
to obviate the necessity for any back wall--the rear of the roof
springing directly from the hillside. A Gujar village, owing to this
peculiarity of construction, always looks oddly like a deposit of great
half-open oysters clinging to the face of the hill.
After a welcome lunch, the ladies both pronounced decidedly against
remaining in or near the highly-scented precincts of the village. The
argument that there was no flat ground excepting roofs to be seen was
overruled; so Walter and I climbed a neighbouring ridge, and selected a
site on the crest.
It was not, certainly, a very good site for a camp, as it was so narrow
that the unwary might easily step over the edge on either side, and
toboggan gracefully either back on top of the aforesaid roof, or forward
into a very rocky-bedded stream which employed its superfluous energy in
tossing some frayed and battered logs from boulder to boulder, and which
would have rejoiced greatly in doing the same to a fallen nestling from
the eyry above.
Neither was the ridge level, and our tents were pitched at such an angle
that the slumberer whose grasp of the bed-head relaxed
"In the mist and shadow of sleep"
was brought to wakefulness by finding his toes gently sliding out into the
nipping and eager air of night.
The holding-ground for the tent-pegs was not all that could be desired,
and visions of our tents spreading their wings in the gale and vanishing
into space haunted us.
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