A single step more would have
plunged him over, to be smashed on the rocks hundreds of feet below.
Martyn did not move or try to guide the beast: he knew that the pony
himself was the safest guide. In a minute or two the animal moved, and
step by step clambered carefully up the rock-strewn mountain-side.
At last they came out on the mountain top, but only to find that they
were on the edge of a flat high plain--a tableland. The air was pure
and fresher; the mules and the travellers revived. Martyn's pony began
to trot briskly along. So, as dawn came up, they came in sight of a
great courtyard built by the king of that country to refresh pilgrims.
Through night after night they tramped, across plateau and mountain
range, till they climbed the third range, and then plunged by a
winding rocky path into a wide valley where, at a great town called
Kazrun, in a garden of cypress trees was a summer-house.
Martyn lay down on the floor but could not sleep, though he was
horribly weary. "There seemed," he said, "to be fire within my head,
my skin like a cinder." His heart beat like a hammer.
They went on climbing another range of mountains, first tormented
by mosquitoes, then frozen with cold; Martyn was so overwhelmed with
sleep that he could not sit on his pony and had to hurry ahead to keep
awake and then sit down with his back against a rock where he fell
asleep in a second, and had to be shaken to wake up when Zechariah,
the Armenian mule driver, came up to where he was.
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