Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/159

 She had looked for the camels of the caravan. They were not to be seen. Nor could she make out the road by which she had come in the night. Paths ran along the lake shore and from house to house; but there was no trace of any road leading away to the north.

"How stupid of me," she reflected. "I must have come up from the south."

The lake was not round; it ran in a long oval under the mountains. She looked to the south. At a distance of perhaps half a mile the valley turned sharply around the shoulder of a mountain. At this point was a building larger than any at the nearer lake shore. It rose, however, from the water's edge.

It was a sheer walled edifice of gray stone. By shading her eyes and straining her sight Edith could make out a lofty arched entrance, a round dome, and twin, spirelike towers rising from either side the arch.

She fancied it resembled the pictures she had seen of Mohammedan mosques. The spires were like the minarets she had glimpsed during the evening when they approached Kashgar. But the walls merged into the gray wall of a cliff behind the edifice. The deep shadow of the lower gorge through which she had been carried in the sedan shrouded the spot. If she had not been looking intently at the place, she would hardly have noticed the mosque at all. Edith realized that, to reach the village, the palanquin must have passed through the mosque.

A wide-winged bird swept low over the lake, circling around the skiff of the fishermen. It moved lazily on the air currents, a black and white creature of the air. It was not a crow, nor an eagle. Yet it must be very large.