The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [573]
Nor was it possible for the members of the Mission to take matters into their own hands and set about closing off the compound or improvising defences, for to be seen doing anything of the kind could only suggest that they distrusted their host and were afraid of being attacked – which could not fail to offend the Amir and Daud Shah, and might well put ideas into the heads of many citizens who would otherwise have remained peaceably inclined.
‘In any case,’ said Sir Louis, ‘it is no bad thing that the Residency should be easily accessible to anyone who wishes to walk in. The more visitors we have the better. Our first duty is to establish friendly relations with the Afghans, and I want no one turned away, or anything done that might suggest that the public are unwelcome and that we wish to keep them at arm's length. In fact, as I have just been saying to the Amir…’
The Amir had received the British Envoy and his suite with flattering cordiality and every sign of friendship, and appeared only too willing to accede to any demand. Sir Louis' request that members of his Mission should be free to receive visits from Afghan officials and Sirdars had been instantly granted, and Sir Louis had returned to the Residency in high feather and dictated a telegram to the Viceroy that read: ‘All well. Had interview with Amir and delivered presents.’ After which he had sat down to write his first dispatches from Kabul, and been able to retire to bed that night feeling elated and confident: everything was going smoothly and his mission to Afghanistan was going to be a triumphant success.
Wally, lying awake in the house on the opposite side of the Residency courtyard, was feeling less pleased with life, having discovered that his bed contained lodgers. It had been bad enough to be reminded of the fact that another and rival Mission had also been official guests in the Residency (and not so long ago either) by finding Russian names scribbled on the walls of his room. But bed-bugs as well were beyond the line. He hoped fervently that his Russian predecessor had suffered equally badly from their attentions, and decided that if these were the best quarters that the Amir of Afghanistan could offer to high-ranking foreign guests, then the rest of the Bala Hissar must be a slum.
The house in which he lay, and the one opposite to it, were both gimcrack structures of lath and plaster supported by wooden pillars, the Envoy's house being a mere two storeys high, while the newly christened ‘Mess House’, in which the three members of the suite were quartered, was a storey higher. Both houses, after the Afghan pattern, had flat roofs that were reached by a flight of stairs, but unlike the single-storey barrack block, neither roof possessed anything that could be called a parapet, and Wally decided that he had seen considerably better buildings in many an Indian bazaar.
He was soon to discover that large, stone-built buildings, tall towers and marble minarets are unsuitable for an area that is subject to earth tremors, and though mud-bricks, wood and plaster may not make for magnificence, they can be safer. Almost the only stone-work in the compound was to be found in the large, single-storeyed barrack block, where a line of stone pillars supported a sloping verandah roof and formed an arcade on either side of the long, open courtyard that divided the quarters allotted to the Mohammedans from those of the Sikhs. Here, despite Cavagnari's orders, Wally had eventually managed to get a second door made to close the front of the open archway that led into it, on the pretext that it would ‘help to keep the place warmer in the winter’.
This archway ran back a full ten feet, like a miniature tunnel, to form a portico from which two flights of steps, one on either side of the entrance, led up in the thickness of the wall to the roof above. The inner end of this tunnel already boasted a massive iron-barred door, and now Wally had had another put in the outer one: admittedly a regrettably flimsy affair, as it was made from unseasoned planks. But in