acrossasiaminoro00chiluoft

308 ACROSS ASIA MINOR ON FOOT
had served me faithfully and preserved me from
danger, and now, for reward, had been offered an
aftront.
In substance his story was that a proposal to rob
me had been made, that he was asked to assist, and
not only refused, but put me under his protection.
It may have been the truth, for a suspicion of some
such scheme had grown on me after I reached Urgub,
but he spoke of it at this time to illustrate his importance
rather than his fidelity. He had got to
the point of revealing secrets to establish his own
standinof.
I did not know who he was, he said. I had heard
men speak of Black Ibrahim, Ali, and others of the
same brigand band. They were his friends. They
were said to be dead ; he could get on his horse and
in six days find them all, still alive and possessing
much money ; while he spoke thus he was inflated
with pride.
I had seen him in various moods, but this was his
strangest, a mood in which every vestige of the
subordinate disappeared. It is impossible to convey
an adequate idea of the mingled dignity and pride the
ragged old man assumed as he sat cross-legged in the
half-light of this dripping hut. No vali, no pasha, no
semi-independent dere-hey could have made a figure
throwing off a greater sense of personal consequence.
A feudal lord insulted in his own castle by his guest
of honour might have attained such a pitch of frigid
politeness and haughty self-assertion—he could not
have exceeded it. In this strange interview I lost all
notion of Ighsan as my servant, and found myself in
effect pooh-poohing the unexpectedly odd humour of
a friend.
The hints he had just dropped about his associates
made a good deal intelligible that hitherto I had
found mysterious. His costly revolver, his English
silver snuff-box and old watch, his scars, his extraordinary
knowledge of the country, his dignity, and
not least the uniform respect shown him, from the