They did not sing
badly, singing in chorus, but it appeared to Amanda that the hour
might have been better chosen. In the morning they were agreeably
surprised to find one of the Englishmen was an Englishwoman, and
followed every accessible detail of her toilette with great
interest. They were quite helpful about breakfast when the trouble
was put to them; two vanished over a crest and reappeared with some
sour milk, a slabby kind of bread, goat's cheese young but hardened,
and coffee and the means of making coffee, and they joined
spiritedly in the ensuing meal. It ought to have been
extraordinarily good fun, this camp under the vast heavens and these
wild visitors, but it was not such fun as it ought to have been
because both Amanda and Benham were extremely cold, stiff, sleepy,
grubby and cross, and when at last they were back in the way to
Podgoritza and had parted, after some present-giving from their
chance friends, they halted in a sunlit grassy place, rolled
themselves up in their blankets and recovered their arrears of
sleep.
Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, those oriental
substitutes for hotels, and it was a deceptively good khan, indeed
it was not a khan at all, it was an inn; it provided meals, it had a
kind of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, it
possessed an upper floor with rooms, separate rooms, opening on to a
gallery.
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