A pointed cap with some tawdry gold lace on it covered his head, and greasy black love-locks writhed filthily over his high cheek bones and into his scanty tangled beard; a suspicious hilt bound with brass wire reared its snake-like head from the folds of his belt, and his legs, terminating in thick-soled native shoes, reminded one of a tarantula in boots.

He salaamed awkwardly with a tortuous grin, and addressed me with the northern salutation, "May your feet never be weary with the march." Having been twenty-four hours in the saddle, my feet were not that portion of my body most wearied, but I replied to the effect that I trusted the shadow of the greasy gentleman might not diminish a hairsbreadth in the next ten thousand years.

We then proceeded to business, and I observed that the man spoke a very broken and hardly intelligible Hindustani.

I tried him in Persian, but it was of no avail.
He spoke Persian, he said, but it was not of the kind that any human being could understand; so we returned to the first language, and I concluded that he was a wandering kabuli.
As an introduction of himself he mentioned Isaacs, calling him Abdul Hafiz Sahib, and he seemed to know him personally.

Abdul, he said, was not far off as distances go in the Himalayas.