The place on my thigh where Jana had pinched out a bit of the skin healed up well enough, but the inflammation struck inwards to the nerve of my left leg, where once I had been injured by a lion, with the result that whenever I tried to move I was tortured by pains of a sciatic nature.

So I was obliged to lie still and to content myself with being carried on the bed into a little garden which surrounded the mud-built and white-washed house that had been allotted to us as a dwelling-place.
There I lay hour after hour, staring at the Holy Mount which began to spring from the plain within a few hundred yards of the scattered township.

For a mile or so its slopes were bare except for grass on which sheep and goats were grazed, and a few scattered trees.

Studying the place through glasses I observed that these slopes were crowned by a vertical precipice of what looked like lava rock, which seemed to surround the whole mountain and must have been quite a hundred feet high.

Beyond this precipice, which to all appearance was of an unclimbable nature, began a dense forest of large trees, cedars I thought, clothing it to the very top, that is so far as I could see.
One day when I was considering the place, Harut entered the garden suddenly and caught me in the act.
"The House of the god is beautiful," he said, "is it not ?" "Very," I answered, "and of a strange formation.