CHAPTER III.

THE WARNING.

The Afghan who entered was tall and muscular, but spare in person and was a very good representation of his active, bold and warlike race. His features were keen and sharp; his nose thin and aquiline; his eyes, black, glittering and piercing; but his complexion was scarcely darker than that of an ordinary Spaniard or French Catalan. The scalp of his head was shaved; but this peculiarity of the Soonies--an orthodox Mohammedan sect in opposition to the Persians who are followers of Ali--was concealed by his head-dress, a _loonghee_, or cloth worn turbanwise, of a bright blue check with a red border and drooping gold fringe.

His costume was extremely simple and consisted of a camise or blouse of scarlet stuff, with loose sleeves, wide baggy trowsers of dark cotton reaching to half-boots that were closely buttoned to the limb. Over his shoulder--as the season was winter--hung a large mantle of finely-dressed sheepskin well tanned, with the soft fleecy wool inwards, and round his waist a Cashmere shawl worn as a girdle, and therein he carried a pair of brass-butted flint-lock pistols, an Afghan knife and dagger. His sabre with cross-hilt and crooked blade dangled nearly in front of him, and on his left wrist, secured by a silver chain, sat a hooded hawk; for now in the nineteenth century, as in Europe ages ago, falconry is a favourite sport of the hardy Afghans.

Such was the remarkable figure which the three young officers rose to greet. Unlike the cringing servility of the slimy Hindoo, the bearing of the Afghan mountaineer is proud, but grave and full of natural dignity; and few were nobler in Cabul than their visitor Taj Mohammed Khan, son of the Hereditary Wuzeer Golam Mohammed, a strenuous adherent of the reigning Shah Sujah and friend of the British Government, which upheld that feeble monarch on his shaky throne.

Taj Mohammed was a very devout Mussulman, and most strictly obeyed the Koran in all its precepts (save one), repeating his prayers five times daily; namely in the morning, when noon is past, in the evening before sunset, and after dark, ere the first watch of the night be passed; but he could not resist an occasional glass of wine.

His family had ever possessed vast influence in that remote region; he was lord of fertile lands and vineyards in the Pughman Valley, and already two of his brothers had fallen in battle, and one been burned alive, for adherence to the Shah, whose story we shall relate in a subsequent chapter.

After being seated and assisted by Denzil to wine, which like many other Mohammedans he drank in secret, or when among unbelieving Feringhees, he proceeded at once to state the object of his visit, which he did in tolerable English, having been long an exile in one of the cities of British India, though the language of his native land is a dialect of the Scriptural Chaldaic.

"You know, Waller Sahib, that the Envoy of the Queen of England and of the great Lord Sahib Bahadur Auckland, is to have a meeting with Ackbar Khan at an early period to consult as to the unsettled state of affairs--the discontents, in fact, among us--in Cabul?"

"Yes, Khan--we have all heard so; and what then?"

"Are you to be present?"

"I expect to have the pleasure," replied Waller.

"Then do not go, and bid the Envoy also not to go."

"Why?"

"Because the conference is a snare--a lure to his destruction and the destruction of all that may accompany him. He will perish, even as Burnes Sahib perished!"

"We are but of subaltern rank, and may not presume to advise the Envoy," said Waller.

"Khan, in front of yonder Cantonments and under the very guns of the forts, I should scarcely say that even Ackbar Khan, desperate though his character is, would attempt such a thing," observed Polwhele.

"You doubt me, then?" said the Afghan, proudly.

"Nay; I only hope that you are labouring under a mistake."

"We shall see; even Ezra had his doubts, so why not may you? Ezra doubted the means by which Jerusalem and its inhabitants would be again restored; but he was cured of those doubts--do you know how?"

"'Pon my soul, I don't," said Polwhele, repressing a yawn.

"By seeing the bones of a dead ass suddenly clothed with flesh and resuscitated with life and breath and action, for so the blessed Koran tells us," replied the Khan; for among the Afghans so much of their common life and daily conversation are tinged with their religion, its legends and precepts, that from the Shah to the veriest slave, one might imagine the whole people to be engaged alone in holy reflections, for seldom is a sentence uttered without some allusion to the Deity; yet, as a nation, they are lively and merry.

"I wish to do you both a service, Sahibs, as gratitude has placed me in your debt. You saved my wife in the Great Bazaar from the insults of a Sepoy soldier, who when drunk with bhang, attempted to overturn her palanquin. I wish to do the Envoy a service and his Queen too, by saving the lives of her servants; thus I repeat and implore you to give ear. Warn Macnaghten Sahib, against the conference to which he is invited, for Ackbar Khan has sworn that he will, if possible, kill every man among you save _one_, and get all your wives and female children into his possession."

"As for my wife," laughed Polwhele, "he is welcome to her."

The Afghan stared at him and frowned.

"By Jove!" exclaimed Waller, incredulously playing with both his fair whiskers this time; "and what is to be done with the lucky fellow he so generously means to spare?"

"He shall have his hands and feet cut off, and be placed at the entrance of the Khyber Pass with a written notice to deter all Feringhees from entering our country again."

"And has the scoundrel sworn this?"

"By every word in the Holy Kulma, the creed of our Prophet, he has. Ackbar the Sirdar is the very incarnation of Eblis--the evil spirit who betrayed Adam to transgression, and yet seeks to do injury to all his race," continued Taj Mohammed with gleaming eyes and a glow in his dusky cheek, for he and Ackbar Khan were politically rivals and mortal enemies.

"I have heard that this fellow Ackbar is somewhat slippery if not more; but if he has ventured to conceive such projects, we should have him tied to the mouth of a nine-pounder," exclaimed Polwhele, adding sundry adjectives and expletives, in which young Englishmen are apt to indulge in moments of excitement, and again the reproving eye of the Wuzeer fell on him.

"Do not talk thus, Sahib," said he sententiously; "know you not, that the tongue is a precious jewel, and hence it is a thousand pities we should pollute it?"

"But would he dare to assassinate the Envoy?" asked Polwhele, angrily.

"Tell me, Sahib, what Ackbar Khan would not dare?" responded the other, quietly.

"Egad that is true, but I hope that our troops will ere long show all those fellows who plot mischief that we have not come 'thus far into the bowels of the land' for nothing," replied Polwhele, laughing; "and to-morrow I, for one, shall begin with the Ghazeeas among yonder hills, Khan."

"The Siah Sung is full of deep and dark caverns, Sahib," said the friendly Afghan; "the Ghazeeas are cunning; so beware alike of surprise and ambush."

"Oh that will be my look-out and Burgoyne's," replied Polwhele, confidently.

"Besides, yonder hills are the chosen haunt of the Ghoul Biaban," said Taj Mohammed, and though a brave man, he lowered his voice as he spoke, for the Afghans believe devoutly in the existence of "the Spirit of the Waste," a lonely demon inhabiting the mountain solitudes; frightful he is, and gigantic in form, devouring any passenger who comes in his way; forming by spells the mirage of the desert to snare the traveller, and disinterring the dead that he may devour them like the wife of the young king of the Black Isles.

"I must take my chance of the Ghoul and the Ghazeeas too; though it will be deuced hard lines to be killed by the latter and eaten, without salt, by the former," said Polwhele, laughing again.

"The shadow of the Prophet be over you and your soldiers, Sahib," said the Afghan, not without a knitted brow; for though he knew perhaps, but the half of what Polwhele said, he saw in his bearing much of that disposition to ridicule, which is so thoroughly intolerable to all foreigners, and does us much mischief everywhere; and to this, and some other mistakes of manner, we owed many of the mischiefs that ensued subsequently in Cabul.

"Historical truth compels us to acknowledge," says the Chaplain to the Forces, "that less regard was paid to the inhabitants than could have been wished. Though they do not, like other Mohammedans, universally shut up their women, the Afghans are as open to jealousy as Orientals in general, and treating their wives often rudely, the latter could not but be pleased with the attentions the young Feringhees showed them. It is much to be feared that our countrymen did not always bear in mind that the domestic habits of any people ought to be sacred in the eyes of strangers. And hence arose by degrees, distrust, alienation, and hostility, for which it were unfair to deny there might be some cause. Whatever errors they committed, the great mass of the garrison of Cabul atoned for them terribly."

We greatly fear that we must also admit to Messieurs Bob Waller, Jack Polwhele, and Harry Burgoyne being among the Feringhee delinquents referred to; and that some of their peccadilloes were alleged to have gone beyond mere oglings, hand-squeezings, and exchange of flowers with the fair Afghani at the Cantonment, the Band-stand, in the Bazaar and the narrow streets of Cabul, which are barely a yard wide.

But to resume:--

"I go to the Bala Hissar to seek the secret ear of the Shah," said Taj Mohammed, as coldly and as drily as if some of the preceding thoughts had been flitting through his mind; "I have but done my grateful duty in coming to warn you of the future storm, for the Envoy of your Queen has more than once turned a deaf ear to my advice; and now----salaam."

And with a low bow he retired ere Waller could start to his feet and usher him out. For sooth to say, Bob had been lounging in his bamboo chair with a leg over each arm thereof and a cheeroot between his teeth; a very undignified mode of sitting in presence of the Hereditary Wuzeer of Cabul.

"A horrid bore!" commented Polwhele; "glad he has gone--took his tipple like a Christian, though; and despite him of Mecca, has polished off the best part of a bottle of mess sherry."

"What the deuce are we to think of all this?" asked Denzil, who had hitherto sat completely silent, and who already in imagination saw the bright and beautiful Rose Trecarrel in the hands of innumerable Afghan Bluebeards with brandished cimitars, and Mabel waving her handkerchief like "Sister Anne" from the tower-head.

"An unpleasant rumour, any way, and we shall not go without our pistols," said Waller. "However, I hope his anxiety for his own post at Court, if Ackbar triumphs, exaggerates the situation."

"They are a strange people, these Afghans," resumed Polwhele musingly, as he filled his tumbler again, adding, "Father Adam's pale ale--water--is always mightily improved by a dash of brandy, thus."

"But I have seen stranger," replied Waller; "when I was in China with the 26th, for there the men wear petticoats and the ladies don't; old fellows fly kites and spin tops, while the young ones study; when puzzled they scratch their feet and not their polls like Europeans; when angry they don't punch the head, but viciously pull each other's tails; and they can write books without an alphabet in that delightful language which we see on the tea-chests. Oh, the Afghans are reasonable fellows, when contrasted with the countrymen of him of the Wonderful Lamp."

"Yes; but the former are a ferocious set, and deem a little homicide, more or less, nothing. Like the Scots Highlanders of old--'

"Take care; it is well Her Majesty's Envoy does not hear you!"

"Every man is born a soldier, I was about to add, and even every boy--a pestilent set of wasps they are--has his knife, and knows how to use it; and they are all taught, that if these black rock and yonder snow-capped hills have little attraction for them here below, the Moollahs add that heaven teems with Houris, and that their reward is there. Talking of Houris, we shall all meet at the Trecarrels to-morrow, I hope; but I shan't see you till I come off Ghazeea hunting; and, by Jove! I would rather go pig-sticking in the jungle, or tiger-potting on a Shikaree elephant, than have a day's shooting against those mad fanatics. However, you'll see the Envoy about what we have heard."

"Of course, Jack."

And whistling a popular waltz, with his sword under his arm, and his forage cap very much over the right ear, Jack Polwhele strode away to Burgoyne's bungalow in the Cantonments, just as the boom of a gun from the nearest fort, and the clang of the guard-house ghurries announced the setting of the sun.

Waller and Denzil sought the Envoy at the Residency; but, unfortunately, he was on a visit to the Shah at the Bala Hissar; thus a most precious opportunity was too probably lost.

We shall neither follow Polwhele to his consultation with Burgoyne about their future movements, nor to their adventures among the cavernous range of the Siah Sung Hills; but in the subsequent chapter shall endeavour to relate on what errand our troops, some four thousand three hundred in number, had come into that remote, ferocious, and most warlike region of all North-western India, seeking to control the views and the passions of five million one hundred and twenty thousand hostile people.