near him standing on the snow, and all the people falls flat on their
faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever he be by land or by
sea."

At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted: "How
could you write a letter up yonder?"

"The letter?--oh!--the letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes,
please. It was a string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of it
from a blind beggar in the Punjab."

I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with
a knotted twig, and a piece of string which he wound round the twig
according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days
or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the
alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me his method,
but I could not understand.

"I sent that letter to Dravot," said Carnehan, "and told him to come
back because this Kingdom was growing too big for me to handle; and then
I struck for the first valley, to see how the priests were working. They
called the village we took along with the Chief, Bashkai, and the first
village we took, Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb was doing all right, but
they had a lot of pending cases about land to show me, and some men from
another village had been firing arrows at night. I went out and looked
for that village, and fired four rounds at it from a thousand yards.
That used all the cartridges I cared to spend, and I waited for Dravot,
who had been away two or three months, and I kept my people quiet.

"One morning I heard the devil's own noise of drums and horns, and Dan