Page:Harold Lamb--The House of the Falcon.djvu/47



a Tartar emperor made it the heart of his kingdom, dust and ruins now. Then the tidal wave of the Osmanli Turk swept over it, and that, too, is gone. After that a Czar and his Cossacks reached out hands, greedy hands for it. Pouf! The wind of Asia, the ghost wind,—tengeri buran the beggars in the hills say—that wind blew, and now the Czar is hoist with a petard and his soldiers are either dead or farmers, my dear Miss Rand."

Fraser-Carnie reined in his horse to point with his riding crop up at the overhanging vastness of the Himalayas. Underneath the forests of the foothills—rising green shoulders, buttresses of the Titan masses above them—Srinagar, the City of the Sun, looked very tiny indeed. And compared with the great peaks that loomed behind the foothills, Switzerland itself, thought Edith, was a toylike place.

Edith's eyes were somber. She threw back her head upon her strong, white throat, looking up at the statuesque boles of the pines that were scarcely smaller than the redwoods of California. She sniffed the pungent fragrance of the deodars.

"It is a garden, after all!" she cried.

Fraser-Carnie glanced at her appreciatively. He relished their rides together. Edith was a horsewoman born, and the major liked that.