The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [0]
The International Bestseller!
More than a million copies sold in paperback!
‘ “Novel” scarcely describes the book, a massive, meticulously researched and fascinating saga about the British in India, encompassing a quarter of a century from the Mutiny up to war with ferocious Afghan tribesmen’ – Sunday Express
‘Incredible’ – Observer
‘For me the find of the year was The Far Pavilions’ – Harry Secombe
‘A triumph’ – Spectator
‘Magnificent… not one of its 950 pages is a page too much’ – Evening Standard
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
M. M. Kaye was born in India and spent most of her childhood and much of her early married life in that country. Her ties with India are strong: her grandfather, father, brother and husband all served the Raj, and her grandfather's first cousin, Sir John Kaye, wrote the standard accounts of the Indian Mutiny and the first Afghan War. When India achieved independence her husband joined the British Army, and for the next nineteen years she followed the drum to all sorts of exciting places she would not otherwise have seen, including Kenya, Zanzibar, Egypt, Cyprus and Berlin. M. M. Kaye is known world-wide for her bestselling historical novels The Far Pavilions and Shadow of the Moon (both of which are published in Penguin), and Trade Wind; and for her detective novels Death in Berlin, Death in Kenya and Death in Cyprus (which are published in one volume by Penguin as Murder Abroad), and Death in Zanzibar, Death in Kashmir and Death in the Andamans (which are published together in Penguin as House of Shade). Penguin also publishes three volumes of autobiography: The Sun in the Morning, Golden Afternoon and Enchanted Evening. M. M. Kaye has also written a children's story, The Ordinary Princess (1991).
THE FAR PAVILIONS
M. M. KAYE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Allen Lane 1978
Published in Penguin Books 1979
40
Copyright © M. M. Kaye, 1978
All rights reserved
Plan of Kabul Residence (page 822) drawn by Reginald Piggott
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192713-8
TO
all those officers and men of different races and creeds who, since 1846, have served with such pride and devotion
in
THE CORPS OF GUIDES
among them
Lieutenant Walter Hamilton, V.C., my husband Major General Goff Hamilton, and his father Colonel Bill Hamilton
‘We are the Pilgrims, Master: We shall go
Always a little further. It may be
Behind that last blue mountain topped with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne, or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men are born…’
James Elroy Flecker
‘T'is not too late to seek a newer world.’
Tennyson
Book One
The Twig is Bent
A glossary of Indian words appears on page 959
1
Ashton Hilary Akbar Pelham-Martyn was born in a camp near the crest of a pass in the Himalayas, and subsequently christened in a patent canvas bucket.
His first cry competed manfully with the snarling call of