Page 119 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

troops had regained control of the village, and were in occupation
of the fort. The place seemed silent and deserted, for all the
villagers had fled; when they reached the fort, they had to beat on
the door for some time before it was opened. They were let in
by the Shaikh’s troops, and spent the night there.
Loch and his companions slept on the roof of the tower. In
the evening, they were amused by watching one of the guards on
a roof below them. First, he carefully collected a quantity of
straw which lie put in a heap, lie then stripped offhis clothes, and
put a light to the straw, next he picked up each garment, and held
it in the smoke, so that it billowed out, and the many thousand
inhabitants of his clothes fell crackling into the flames! Having
thus dc-louscd his clothes, lie put them on again ‘thus he supposed
himself to have clean linen for at least another month, and he
appeared to be most comfortable after the cleaning, at which
there was no great wonder’. However, he seems to have left out
his body and his head!
The next stop was Rohilla, near the river of that name, which
was about fifty yards wide, but so impregnated with sulphur,
‘mixed with black naphtha’ that the water could neither be used
for drinking or for cultivation. This place was not a very great
distance from the area where a century later oil was discovered,
and the ‘sulphurous streams’ to which Loch refers, may have
come from oil seepages. Sir John Malcolm’s falconer met the
party at Rohilla, where lie had prepared for them a most com­
fortable hut under some trees, which they occupied for three
days, when they spent their time hunting and hawking. Loch
found hawking ‘the most interesting of all the sports I have ever
witnessed’. It seems to have been his first experience of falconry,
though it was still popular in Scotland and in parts of England.
As recently as thirty years ago, the Malcolms of Poltalloch in
Argyllshire, kept hawks, and hunted with them. Loch describes
their first morning’s sport.
Soon after daylight, the party went off on horseback across the
plains where gazelle were likely to be found. There was little
cover, only small stunted shrubs, tufts of stiff grass which was
used by the Persians for making fine mats, liquorice plants, and
an occasional tamarisk tree. The falconer and his son carried
hawks on their wrists, hooded and fastened to the rider’s gauntlet
by a jess, a short leather throng around the bird’s legs, which
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