The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [489]
‘What else? There must be something else.’
‘Of course – though I should have thought that by itself would have been enough for most people. She is…’ Ash hesitated, searching for words that would describe what Anjuli meant to him, and then said slowly: ‘She is the other half of me. Without her, I am not complete. I don't know why this should be, I only know it is so; and that there is nothing I can't tell her, or talk to her about. She can ride like a Valkyrie and she has all the courage in the world, yet at the same time she is like – like a quiet and beautiful room where one can take refuge from noise and storms and ugliness, and sit back and feel peaceful and happy and completely content: a room that will always be there and always the same… Does that sound very dull to you? It doesn't to me. But then I don't want constant change and variety and stimulation in a wife; I can get plenty of that in everyday life and see it happening all around me. I want love and companionship, and I've found that in Juli. She is loving and loyal and courageous. And she is my peace and rest. Does that tell you what you want to know?’
‘Yes,’ said Wally, and smiled at him. ‘I'd like to meet her.’
‘So you shall. This evening, I hope.’
Wally had been sitting with his legs drawn up and his hands clasped about them, and now he dropped his chin on his knees, and staring ahead of him at the sun-glare on the white dust of the road and the back-drop of the foothills that lay shimmering in the heat, said contentedly: ‘You don't know how much I've been looking forward to you coming back to us. And so have a lot of others; the men still talk about you, and they are always asking for news of you and when you'll be coming back. They have a name for you – they call you “Pelham-Dulkhan” – did you know that? and when we are out on an exercise or on manoeuvres, they tell tales about your doings in Afghanistan round the camp fires at night. I've heard them at it…. and now you really are coming back at last – I can't believe it…!’ He drew a long, slow breath and let it out as slowly.
‘Is it kissing the Blarney Stone you've been?’ jeered Ash, grinning at him. ‘Stop spreading on the butter and talk sense for a change. Tell me about this Afghan business.’
Wally returned the grin, and putting personal matters aside, talked instead, and with considerable knowledge and acumen, of the problem posed by Afghanistan – a subject which at that time was much on the minds of men who served in the Peshawar Field Force.
Ash had been out of touch with Frontier matters for many months, and very little of this had so far penetrated to Gujerat, where men had less reason to trouble themselves over the doings of the Amir of a wild and inaccessible country far and far to the north, beyond the Khyber hills and the mountains of the Safed Koh. But now he was reminded again of what Koda Dad had said to him at their last meeting – and Zarin only yesterday – and as he listened to Wally, he felt as though he had been living in a different world…
During the past few years the Amir of Afghanistan, Shere Ali, had found himself in the unenviable position of the ‘corn between the upper and the lower millstones' – the simile was his own; the northern and uppermost one being Russia and the lower Great Britain, both of whom had designs on his country.
The latter had already annexed the Punjab and the Border-land beyond the Indus, while the former had swallowed the ancient principalities of Tashkent, Bokara, Kohkund and Kiva. Now Russian armies were massing on the northern frontiers of Afghanistan, and a new Viceroy, Lord Lytton, who combined obstinacy and a lofty ignorance of Afghanistan with a determination to extend the bounds of Empire to the greater glory of his country (and possibly of himself?) had been instructed by Her Majesty's Government to lose no time in sending an Envoy to Afghanistan charged with the task of overcoming the Amir's ‘apparent reluctance’ to the establishment of British Agencies within his dominions.