The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [548]
‘No. A letter would not serve. I must speak to him myself face to face if I hope to convince him that what I say is true. Besides, you yourself will be travelling on that same road and are just as likely to be struck down by the cholera as I am.’
‘If I were, my chances of recovery would be greater than yours, for I am not an Angrezi,’ said Zarin dryly. ‘And if I died, my wife would not be left alone and friendless in a strange land. But there is little fear of my taking the cholera because I shall not be travelling by that road.’
‘You mean you are staying here? But I understood that Jalalabad was to be evacuated – horse, foot and guns. That everyone would be leaving.’
That is so. And I too will be going, but by way of the river.’
‘Then I will go with you,’ said Ash.
‘As yourself? Or as Syed Akbar?’
‘As Syed Akbar; for as I shall be returning to Kabul, it would be too dangerous to do anything else.’
‘That is true,’ said Zarin. ‘I will see what can be done about it.’
It was a tradition with the Guides that an officer who died while serving with the Corps should, if humanly possible, be buried at Mardan. So that when his men urged that Battye-Sahib's body should not be left behind, it was agreed that the coffin should be exhumed. But because of the difficulties of taking it with them in the heat of June, it was decided to try sending it by raft down the Kabul River through the gorges north of the Khyber, and that terra incognita the Mallagori country, to Nowshera.
Risaldar Zarin Khan and three sowars had been assigned to escort the coffin. And at the last moment Zarin had asked permission to take a fifth man: an Afridi who had arrived in Jalalabad the previous evening, and who, said Zarin mendaciously, was a distant connection of his and would be an invaluable addition to the escort, as he had made this journey before and was familiar with every turn and twist and hazard of the river.
Permission had been granted, and in the dark hour before dawn, the raft that was to carry Wigram's remains back to their last resting place in Mardan set out on the long and hazardous voyage to the plains.
57
Daylight was beginning to fade when the look-out, who had lain all day on a ledge of cliff above the river, lifted his head and whistled in imitation of a kite. Sixty yards away a second man, concealed by a crevice in the rock face, passed on the signal, and heard it repeated by a third.
There were more than a dozen watchers lying in wait along the left bank of the gorge, but even a man with binoculars would not have suspected it; and the men on the raft had no such aids. Moreover, they needed to concentrate the greater part of their attention on keeping their unwieldy craft clear of rocks and whirlpools, for the snows were melting in the mountains to the north, and the Kabul River ran high and swiftly.
There were six men on the raft, four of whom – a tall Pathan, two black-bearded Sikhs and a burly Punjabi Mussulman – wore the dust-coloured uniform of the Corps of Guides. The fifth, a lean Afridi wth a ragged red-tinged beard, was less formally clad, it being his task to wield the heavy ten-foot pole that served as a rudder; and in deference to the heat and the exertions of his office he wore only a thin shirt above the wide cotton trousers of his race. The sixth was a British officer, but he was