The Ruby Sword. Mitford Bertram

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       Bertram Mitford

      The Ruby Sword

      A Romance of Baluchistan

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066141820

Table of Contents

       Bertram Mitford

       "The Ruby Sword"

       "A Romance of Baluchistan"

       Chapter One.

       Chapter Two.

       Chapter Three.

       Chapter Four.

       Chapter Five.

       Chapter Six.

       Chapter Seven.

       Chapter Eight.

       Chapter Nine.

       Chapter Ten.

       Chapter Eleven.

       Chapter Twelve.

       Chapter Thirteen.

       Chapter Fourteen.

       Chapter Fifteen.

       Chapter Sixteen.

       Chapter Seventeen.

       Chapter Eighteen.

       Chapter Nineteen.

       Chapter Twenty.

       Chapter Twenty One.

       Chapter Twenty Two.

       Chapter Twenty Three.

      Bertram Mitford

       Table of Contents

"The Ruby Sword"

       Table of Contents

"A Romance of Baluchistan"

       Table of Contents

Chapter One.

       Table of Contents

      The Ghazis.

      “We love to roam, the wide world our home,

       As the rushing whirlwind free;

       O’er sea and land, and foreign strand,

       Who would not a wanderer be!

       “To the far off scenes of our youthful dreams

       With a lightsome heart we go;

       On the willing hack, or the charger’s back,

       Or the weary camel slow.”

      Thus sang the wayfarer to himself as he urged a potentially willing, but certainly very tired hack along the stony, sandy road which wound gradually up the defile; now overhanging a broad, dry watercourse, now threading an expanse of stunted juniper—the whole constituting a most depressing waste, destitute alike of animal, bird—or even insect—life.

      The wayfarer sang to keep up his spirits, for the desolation of the surroundings had already begun to get upon his nerves. He was thoroughly tired out, and very thirsty, a combination of discomfort which is apt to get upon one’s temper as well. His steed, a sorry quadruped at best, seemed hardly able to put one leg before another, wearied out with a long day’s march over arid plains, where the sun blazed down as a vast burning-glass upon slabs of rock and mounds of dry soil, streaked white here and there with gypsum—and now the ascent, gradual as it was, of the mountain defile had about finished both horse and rider.

      Twice had the latter dismounted, with a view to sparing his worn-out steed by leading it. But the exasperating quadruped, in shameful disregard of the superabundant intelligence wherewith popular superstition persists in endowing that noble—but intensely stupid—animal the horse, flatly refused to be led; standing stockstill with every attempt. So his efforts in the cause of combined humanity and expediency thus defeated, the wayfarer had no alternative but to keep his saddle, where, sitting wearily, and with feet kicked limply from the stirrups, he now and then swung a spur-armed heel into the bony ribs—which incentive had about as much effect as if applied to an ordinary jog the while he went on half singing, half humming, to himself:

      “There’s a charm in the crag, there’s a charm in the cloud,

       There’s a charm in the earthquake’s throe;

       When the hills are wrapt in a moonlit shroud

       There’s a charm in the glacier’s snow.

       “We bask in the blaze of the sun’s bright rays

       By the murmuring river’s flow;

       And we scale the peak of the mountain steep,

       And gaze on the storms below.

      “For use around a snug camp fire, that would be an excellent traveller’s song,” said this one to himself—“But