A shaven, crouching Balti, who had come down with the horses, and who was nominally some sort of degraded Buddhist, fawned upon the priest, and in thick gutturals besought the Holy One to sit at the horseboys' fire.
Have wired two thousand rupees your credit Luchman Narain's bank-' This was entirely in the way of trade, but every one of those telegrams was discussed and re- discussed, by parties who conceived themselves to be interested, before they went over to the railway station in charge of a foolish Balti, who allowed all sorts of people to read them on the road.
Then Mahbub Ali rolled across the serai to the Gate of the Harpies who paint their eyes and trap the stranger, and was at some pains to call on the one girl who, he had reason to believe, was a particular friend of a smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit who had waylaid his simple Balti in the matter of the telegrams.
'I do not give to a lousy Tibetan; but ask my Baltis over yonder behind the camels.
Go, sit among my Baltis,' said Mahbub Ali, and the lama drifted off, soothed by the promise.
The lama, sumptuously fed by Mahbub's Baltis, was already asleep in a corner of one of the stalls.
Of course, the longer game is to attract young, British-trained chefs but the prospect of cooking a
balti over a high flame in a hot kitchen or getting wrist burns using a tandoor may not currently hold an attraction.