They are a queer race, these Eeliauts, [B] and have little or nothing in common with the other natives.

The sight of a well-filled lunch-basket and flasks of wine (which our kind hosts had insisted on our taking) would have brought ordinary gipsies out like flies round a honey-pot, if recollections of Epsom or Henley go for anything.

Not so the Eeliauts, who, stranger still, never even begged for a sheis--a self-control I rewarded by presenting the chief, a swarthy handsome fellow, in picturesque rags of bright colour, with a couple of kerans.

But he never even thanked me! It seemed, next morning, as if we had jumped, in a night, from early spring into midsummer.

Although at daybreak the ice was thick on a pool outside the caravanserai, the sun by midday was so strong, and the heat so excessive, that we could scarcely get the mules along.
The road lies through splendid scenery.