CHAPTER XVI.

TO TOORKISTAN!

The pen of Scott would have failed to describe, and the pencil of Gustave Doré to depict, the anguish of the poor hostages, when, at the behest of Ackbar, and at the very time the long prayed-for succour was coming, they were compelled to set out on their sorrowful journey towards the Land of Desert.

"Oh, my poor children--my helpless lambs--my fatherless little ones!" one would cry, folding in her loving arms her scared, pale, and half-starved brood, gathering them to her while they were yet _her own_, "even as a hen gathereth her chickens."

"My husband--my husband! shall we never meet again?"

"My poor 'Bob,' or 'Bill,' or, it might be, 'Tom,'" some soldier's wife would exclaim, "I shall never see the likes of you more, darling;" for though Tom perhaps drank all his pay, and gave Biddy now and then "a taste of his buff belt," he "was an angel, compared to a naygur, anyhow!"

But the majority of the hostages were ladies, and some of them were like Lady Macnaghten and Sir Robert Sale's daughter, who were widows--who had lost alike husband and children, and mourned as those only mourn who have no hope. And now many a quaint pet name, known best in the nursery ami to the playfulness of the loving heart, was mingled with the most solemn of prayers.

"Death--death were better than this!" would be the despairing cry of some; and, ere their sad journey ended, death came to more than one of that devoted band.

For in one or two instances, despite the piteous entreaties of the ladies, some soldiers--those very men whom the 13th had subscribed their rupees at the drum-head to ransom--whose weakness from wounds or bodily illness rendered them incapable of riding or marching were shot by the wayside, and left unburied, even as so many lamed horses or diseased dogs which were useless might have been. One or two, who were weary of life, entreated to have it ended thus, and all whom the Dooranees destroyed thus in obedience to Ackbar's orders and the grim law, perhaps, of necessity, died peacefully and piously--sick of their present existence, and hopeful of the future; but the women screamed, lamented, and prayed, seeking to muffle their ears when the death-shots rang in the mountain wilderness.

Mabel Trecarrel was weak and ailing too, but she was much too valuable a species of commodity to be shot out of hand, like a poor Feringhee soldier, even though quite as much a Kaffir and infidel as he might be; so she was tenderly borne in a palanquin which had been found in the cantonments, and which contained every comfort and appliance for travelling--little drawers for holding clothes or food, and even a mirror, though she never looked at it.

Like a few more, she was silent in her grief, and found a refuge in tears.

The wedded wife might utter loudly and despairingly the name of her husband, and the parent that of the dead or absent child, finding a relief for the overcharged heart in sound; but, even in that terrible time, the poor betrothed girl could only whisper, in the inmost recesses of her breast, of the lover she never more might see, and gaze backward with haggard eyes on the features of the landscape with which they had both become familiar--the hills of Beymaru, the ridges of the Black Rocks, and the smiling valley of Cabul, as they all lessened and faded away in the distance, while slowly but surely, under a watchful and most unscrupulous guard, the train of prisoners, on active Tartar horses or plodding Afghan yaboos, in swinging dhooleys and curtained litters of other kinds, wound among the mountains on their way to Toorkistan, the frontiers of which were only about a week's journey distant.

And what was the prospect before them?

Separation and distribution, to be bartered for horses, or sold into slavery and degradation; the few men among them, irrespective of rank, to be the bondsmen, syces, carpet-spreaders, and grooms, hewers of wood and drawers of water: the women, if young, to be the veriest slaves of ignorant and unlettered masters, as yet unseen and unknown; if old, to become nurses and drudges to the women of the Usbec Tartars: and all these were Christians, and civilised subjects of the Queen; many of them accomplished, highly bred, nobly born, and tenderly nurtured.

Terrible were the emotions of the English mother, who, circumstanced thus, looked on her pure and innocent daughters and thought of what a week might bring forth!

Yet such were the fates before them--the fates that even the quickest marching of our troops might fail to avert; for were not the Afghans, as they heard, again disputing every inch of the Passes with a desperation which proved that Lord Auckland's policy, and that of the "peace at any price party" at home, would never have availed with those who deemed diplomacy but cowardly cunning, treaties as trash, bribes as fair "loot," and all war as legal fraud?

The lamentations of the women at times, when mingled and united (for grief is very infectious), roused even the usually phlegmatic Saleh Mohammed, who rode in the centre of the caravan, perched between the humps of a very high camel.

"In the land to which you are going, of course, you shall find neither Jinnistan, the Country of Delight, nor its capital, the City of Precious Stones; neither will fruits and sweet cakes drop into your mouths, as if you sat under the blessed tree of Toaba, which is watered by the rivers of paradise," said he, half scoffingly; "but you will see the vast sandy waste of the Kirghisian desert, which to the thirsty looks like a silvery sea in the distance; and some of you may happily see the city of Souzak, which contains five hundred houses of stone, and I doubt if the Queen of the Feringhees has so many in her little island. Barikillah! and you will see the black tents and the fleecy flocks of the Usbec Tartars, for they are numerous as leaves in the vale of Cashmere."

And thus he sought to console them when, on the evening of the first day's journey, they halted at Killi-Hadji, on the Ghuznee road (only seven miles westward from Cabul), and so called from the killi, or fort of mud that guards its cluster of huts. It was approached by narrow and tortuous lanes overhung by shady mulberry-trees; and there, beside the walls of the fort, they bivouacked for the night.

The deep crimson glory of sunset was over; but the flush of the western sky lengthened far the purple shadows of tree, and rock, and hut, even of the tall camels, ere they knelt to rest, across the scene of the bivouac, which was not without its strong aspect of the quaint and picturesque, albeit the sad eyes of those who looked thereon were sick of such elements, as being associated with all their most unmerited miseries.

Unbitted, with leather tobrahs, or nose-bags filled with barley, hanging from their heads, the patient horses were eating, while the hardier yaboos grazed the long grass that grew in the lanes and waste places.

Fires were lighted, and around them all of the Dooranee guard, who were not posted in the chain of sentinels, sat cross-legged, smoking hempseed, cleaning their arms, fixing fresh flints or dry matches to their musket-locks; others were industriously picking out of their furred poshteens those active insects of the genus _pulex_, called by the Arabians "the father of leapers," while the flesh of a camel, which had been shot by the way, as useless--its feet being wounded and sore--sputtered and broiled on the embers for supper, and the light from the flames fell in strong gleams and patches on the strange equipment, the swarthy turbaned faces, and gleaming eyes of those wild fellows, whose shawl-girdles bristled with arms and powder-flasks, and some four hundred of whom were furnished with muskets and bayonets.

A spear stuck upright in the earth--its sharp point glittering like a tiny red star--indicated the head-quarters, where, muffled in his poshteen and ample chogah, with a piece of thick xummul folded under him, Saleh Mohammed Khan, propped against the saddle of his camel, prepared, with pipe in mouth, to dose away the hours of the short August night.

Most, if not nearly all, the lady captives, wore now, of necessity, the Afghan travelling-dress, a large sheet shrouding the entire form, having a bourkha, or veil of white muslin, furnished with two holes to peep through; and with those who, muffled thus, sat in kujawurs, or camel-litters, the semblance of their orientalism was complete.

From time to time, dried branches or cass--a prickly furze grass which grows in bunches--were cast upon the fire, causing the flames to shoot up anew, on the pale faces of the prisoners and the dark faces of their guards, till at last the embers died out and the white ashes alone remained; and such was the scene which, like a species of phantasmagoria, met the eyes of Mabel Trecarrel, when, in the still watches of the night, she drew back the curtains of her palanquin and looked forth occasionally. But the stars began to pale in the sky; its blue gave place to opal tints; the sun arose, and after the Mohammedans had said their prayers with their faces towards Mecca, and the Christians with their eyes bent towards the earth or to heaven, once more the heartless march was resumed, in the same order as on the preceding day, through a pass in the mountains, and from thence across the beautiful valley of Maidan.

Saleh Mohammed, though a Khan, having once been a Soubadar in Captain Hopkins's Afghan Levy (from which he had deserted to the party of Ackbar Khan, at the beginning of the troubles), had some ideas of military order and show: thus he had at the head of the caravan--for it resembled nothing else--six Hindostanees, furnished with some of our drums and bugles gleaned up in the Khyber Pass, and with these they made the most horrible noises for several miles at the commencement and close of each day's march; but even this medley of discordant sounds failed to extract the faintest smile from the hostages--even from Major Pottinger and the few soldiers--so sunk were they in heart and spirit now.

In the Maidan valley they rode between fields of golden grain bordered by towering poplars and pale willows. Bare, bleak-looking mountains undulated in the distance, and the poor ladies eyed them wistfully.

Were these the borders of dreaded Toorkistan?

They proved, however, to be only a portion of the Indian Caucasus, the extremity of which, the Koh-i-baba, a snow-clad peak, rises to the height of sixteen thousand feet above the level of the Indian Sea.

That night Saleh Mohammed chose a pleasant halting-place for them, influenced by some sudden emotion of pity. There they were supplied with plums, wild cherries, peaches, and the white apricot which has the flavour of rose water. But ere morning there was an alarm; a confused discharge of musketry was fired in every direction at random, all round the bivouac; one or two bullets whistled through it. A dhooley-wallah was shot dead, and several red arrows, barbed and bearded, stuck quivering in the turf; yells were heard, and then a furious galloping of horses passing swiftly away in the distance.

It was a chupao--a night attack planned by some of the Hazarees, a wild and independent Tartar tribe, whose thatched huts lie sunk and unseen on the hill slopes, and on whose confines they had halted. They are all good archers, and, though armed with the matchlock, usually prefer the bow.

They are bitter foes of the Afghans, and had hoped, by making a dash, to cut off some of their prisoners; but Saleh Mohammed was too wary for them, and on that evening had doubled his guards ere the sun went down.

The 2nd of September found the train traversing the Kaloo Mountain, one in height only inferior to the Koh-i-baba. From thence, over a vast chaos of wild and terrific hilly peaks that spread beneath them like the pointed waves of a petrified sea, they could view, at last, and afar off, the plains of Toorkistan--the land of their future bondage; and anew the wail of grief and woe rose from them at the sight.

The following day, that the absurd might not be wanting amid their misery, to the surprise of all, Saleh Mohammed appeared mounted on his camel, not in his usual amplitude of turban, with his flowing chogah and Cashmere shawls, but with his lean, shrunken, and bony figure buttoned up in a tight regimental blue surtout, with gold shoulder-scales, and crimson sash, frog-belt, and sword, all of which had whilom belonged to Jack Polwhele, of the Cornish Light Infantry, a tiny forage cap (which Jack used to wear very much over his right ear) being perched on the back of his bald head, while the chin-strap came uncomfortably only below the tip of his high hooked nose; and thus arrayed he prepared to meet and, as he hoped, duly to impress Zoolficar Khan, the governor of the town of Bameean, where the first halt was to be made for further and final orders from Ackbar, as to whether the hostages should be sold or slain; for now their custodian began to have some strange doubts upon the subject, and now his victims were fairly out of Afghanistan and in the land of the Tartars, nine days of monotonous and arduous journey distant from Cabul.

We have lately seen the kind of mercy meted out to helpless hostages by Communal savages in the boasted city of Paris--the self-styled centre of civilization--and so may fairly tremble for the fate of those who were in the hands of Asiatic fanatics on the western slopes of the Hindoo-Kush.