The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [530]
The Begum had provided Afghan dress, a sheepskin poshteen and Gilgit boots for Anjuli, and charged Gul Baz with procuring two broken-down nags in the bazaar, capable of bearing them, but unlikely to attract the attention or envy of even the most acquisitive tribesman. She had herself stayed up to see them depart unobtrusively and by night, as Ash had done; and as she bolted the little side gate behind them, she sighed, remembering her own youth and the handsome young man who had brought her to this house as a bride so many years ago, and whom she had loved so greatly. ‘Yes, I too would have done the same,’ mused the Begum. ‘I will pray that she will be permitted to reach Kabul in safety and find her man there. But it is ill weather for travelling, and I fear the journey will be a hard one.’
It had been even harder than the Begum feared, and in the course of it they had lost one of the horses, the animal having slipped while being led along a narrow track that was barely more than a ledge of rock, and fallen to its death in a gully some three hundred feet below. Gul Baz had risked his neck climbing down that treacherous, icy slope in the teeth of a gale in order to rescue the saddle-bags, because they could not afford to lose the provisions they contained, and he had had a hard time crawling back with them to safety. Later they had twice been snowbound for several days, but the Begum's prayer had been answered: after more than a fortnight on the road they had reached Kabul safely, and knocking at the door of a house in a quiet street in the shadow of the Bala Hissar, found Ash there.
54
On the twenty-first day of February 1879, Shere Ali died in Mazar-i-Sherif in Afghan Turkestan, and his son Yakoub Khan became Amir in his stead. But the new Amir, far from making overtures to the British, was already hard at work building up and re-organizing the Afghan army.
Cavagnari's spies reported that the fighting-men in Kabul and Ghazi were determined to avenge the capture of Ali Masjid and the Peiwar Kotal, and that they already numbered seven thousand cavalry and twelve thousand infantry, together with sixty guns; though this and similar items of information had been treated with a certain amount of scepticism, as it came from native informers who had a tendency to embroider a good story. But Wigram Battye had received private confirmation of this from someone signing himself ‘Akbar’, the writer also asserting that even those tribes who were regarded as friendly were becoming restless and hostile, and Afridis everywhere were demanding to know why, now that Shere Ali was dead, the Indian Government should continue to keep an army in Afghanistan and to build forts and barracks in their country? Did this mean that the English did not intend to keep the promises made to the people of Afghanistan at the beginning of the war?
‘…and I would strongly advise,’ wrote ‘Akbar’, ‘that you do what you can to persuade those fatheads in authority that this is no time to allow the Survey Department to send out endless small parties to draw maps of the country; it only serves to stir up ill-feeling and confirm a widespread suspicion that the English are plotting to take over the whole of Afghanistan, for as you know, the Pathans have an inveterate hatred of the Surveyor and believe that where the Government sends one, an army will follow. So for God's sake try and get them to stop it.’
Wigram had done his best; but without success.
Mr Scott and his assistants had been savagely attacked