ABSTRACT
Next morning Bater returned, not alone, but in the company of a strange being. Bater treated our new guest with a kind of shy reverence and I watched him curiously. He was of indeterminable age, possibly younger than his wrinkled and weather-bitten face suggested, and he was small and very spare, but moved with an assurance and poise such as one seldom finds among the horsemen of Central Asia. He had small black eyes which roved for a moment round the house, suddenly fixing themselves on some particular object, to pass on farther with the speed of lightning until they had taken in everything around him. He was like a wild animal securing itself against danger. Finally he let his eyes rest on me in a long glance, intensely penetrating and searching, to be at last transformed into two wells of friendliness, and his whole face gathered into a network of wrinkles which lay upon his large mouth and friendly eyes in a manner which showed that he lived a great part of his life with a smile upon his lips, yes, with a smile upon his whole flat face. He had white whiskers by his ears, and from his chin hung a long, thin goat’s beard. On his head he wore a tall, conical fur cap covered on the outside with yellow silk, faded and tattered. He was wrapped in a great cloak of goatskin with the hair outward. On his feet, outside his long unti, he had short boots of the 225skin of the legs of wolves so made that the hair was turned downward. On his back was fixed a pannier of willow twigs in which he carried a well-filled leather bag. The wolf, the Mongols’ hereditary enemy, alive … https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429057496/8ecf9103-e065-4bfa-870e-7dd8e8f4a07a/content/plate_48a.jpg"/> and dead https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429057496/8ecf9103-e065-4bfa-870e-7dd8e8f4a07a/content/plate_48b.jpg"/> “Ole ’en Lama” https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429057496/8ecf9103-e065-4bfa-870e-7dd8e8f4a07a/content/plate_49.jpg"/>
