"He was my brother's enemy, Sahib," replied Mir Daoud Khan Mir Hafiz
Ullah Khan, principal Native Officer of the 99th Baluch Light Infantry
and member of the ruling family of Mekran Kot in far Kubristan.

"And what made him so blind as to be for a proverb unto you?"

"Just some little drops of water, Sahib, nothing more," replied the big
man with a smile that lifted the curling moustache and showed the
dazzling perfect teeth.

It was bitter, bitter cold--cold as it only can be in hot countries (I
have never felt the cold in Russia as I have in India) and the khaki
flannel shirt, khaki tunic, shorts and putties that had seemed so hot
in the cruel heat of the day as we made our painful way across the
valley, seemed miserably inadequate at night, on the windy hill-top.
Moreover I was in the cold stage of a go of fever, and to have escaped
sunstroke in the natural oven of that awful valley at mid-day seemed but
the prelude to being frost-bitten on the mountain at midnight.
Subedar-Major Mir Daoud Khan Mir Hafiz Ullah Khan appeared wholly
unaffected by the 100° variation in temperature, but then he had a few
odd stone of comfortable fat and was bred to such climatic trifles. He,
moreover, knew not fever, and, unlike me, had not experienced dysentery,
malaria, enteric and pneumonia fairly recently.

"And had the hand of your brother anything to do with the little drops
of water that made Ibrahim the Weeper so blind?" I asked.

"Something, Sahib," replied Mir Daoud Khan with a laugh, "but the hand
of Allah had more than that of my brother. It is a strange story. True
stories are sometimes far stranger than those of the bazaar tale-tellers