THE WILD GOAT. 171 



the house. Its highest point was some seven hundred 

 feet above the plain. It was perhaps a mile long, 

 and half a mile in width a great roughly rectangular 

 mass of limestone that lay upon the plain like a 

 brick upon a smooth floor. There were places where 

 the precipice was broken, and there, though the fall 

 appeared to be only a few degrees less than perpen- 

 dicular, trees and bushes grew so closely and so 

 directly under one another that the tops of the 

 lower trees seemed to brush against the trunks of 

 the trees that sprang from the rocks above them. 



Hussein, my host, described the hill as not difficult 

 of ascent, its precipices being easily avoided, and said 

 that it was the home of a number of wild goats. He 

 told me that from the house, where we sat, he often 

 heard them bleating, and that whenever men climbed 

 the hill in search of the rare and valuable Kamuning 

 wood they generally saw fresh tracks. It was seldom, 

 however, that any one saw the animals. 



" Shoot them ? " he said, in answer to a question. 

 " No, no one ever tries to shoot them. Why should 

 a man climb a rock as high and as steep as that to 

 shoot a goat when, with half the trouble, he could 

 shoot a deer twice its size on the plain below ? " 



It was certainly an alluring prospect. There were 

 some goats, perhaps even a considerable number, 

 living upon this isolated rock, whose area was com- 

 paratively small and most strictly circumscribed. 

 Even if they wanted to do so, the goats could not 

 get away, and from the moment that one set foot 

 on the hill one was within a mile of them. Viewed 

 from below, the summit of the hill appeared to be 



