Part 27 (1/2)
”Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?”
That question was in Pashtu, directed at Is answered it
”Oh, as for that,” he said, salaaentleue than Pashtu and my own Rajasthani My name is Kurram Khan I ask adold bracelet, and high over his head the Rangar laughed like a bell
”Shabash!+” he laughed ”Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome, thou and thy men Be welcome in her naiving on a kind of courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign ofor stairs, or of any ar had addressed him What he did see, as he faced that as that each of his men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he entered
”Whom do ye salute?” he asked
Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one ould rebuke a fool
”Is this not her nest these days?” he answered ”It is well to bo She is not as other woap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard ca villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun and stared at them under his hand After a leisurely consideration of theer, spat conte it queerly and turning on his heel He did not say one word
King led the way after him on foot, for even in the ”Hills” where cruelty is a virtue, abehind hi an almost interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of square stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff
At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to overhead defenses Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard but as commanded from overhead Khinjan bad been rebuilt since its last destruction by so Like Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside arave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until unexpectedly at last a seeht street, of fair width, andIt is s” on the secret army maps, and it has been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out of India, that ajourney never expects to find it the same on his return
It was lined on either hand with s, out of which aand his ated iron-that cursed, hot, hideous stuff that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of wood-of stone-of mud-of mat of skins-even of tent-cloth Most of them were filthy A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan's fighting men all possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like wasp nests on a wall These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere penniless and the uard by any means
There were Hindus-sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts) In proof of Khinjan's catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there omen of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice And there were little children-little naked brats with round drum tummies, who squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; so to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a stone that utter on the far side and, started a fight ay street curs, which proved a diversion and probably saved King's party from more accurate attentions
Perhaps a thousand souls caovernovernment brand on the mules, and after a minute or then the procession was half-way down the street, a man reproved the child who had thrown a stone, and he was backed up by the others They classified King correctly, exactly as he meant they should As a haki-felt want; but by the brand on his accouterments he walked an openly avowed robber, and that made him a brother in crime Somebody cuffed the next child who picked up a stone
He knew the street of old, although it had changed perhaps a dozen times since he had seen it It was a cul-de-sac, and at the end of it, just as on his previous visit, there stood a stone ainst the mountain-side The fact that it was aused as such in Khinjan, had saved it froround by the last British expedition
It was a famous mosque in its way, for the bed-sheet of the Prophet is known to hang in it, preserved against the ravages of tis before and behind, so that it hangs like a great thin sandwich before the rear stone wall King had seen it Very vividly he recalled his almost exposure by a suspicious e For the Secret Service s
There had been an attempt since his last visit towith the building's use It was cleaner It had been smeared ash A platform had been built on the roof for the muezzin But it still looked more like a fort than a place of worshi+p
Toward it the one-eyed ruffian led the ith the long, leisurely-seeait of a mountaineer At the door, in the middle of the end of the street, he paused and struck on the lintel three ti, to say the least, in a land where theplace for hoht to enter
A mullah, shaven like a mummy for some unaccountable reason-even his eyebrows and eyelashes had been reh the door and blinked at the, and at last the uide grounded his gun-butt on the stone, and the procession waited, watched by the crowd that had lost its interest sufficiently to talk and joke
In two minutes the mullah returned and threw anarrow strip that he kicked and unrolled in front of him all across the floor of thethat the horses and ht after all!”to himself
In a steel box at Simla is a memorandum, made after his former visit to the place, to the effect that the entrance into Khinjan Caves ht possibly be inside the mosque nobody had believed it likely, and he had not ood, even when the next step may lead into a death-trap, to see one's first opinions confirmed
He nodded to himself as the outer door slammed shut behind them, for that was another h slit-like s, changing darkness into gloo at the Prophet's bed-sheet But for a section of white wall to either side of it, the relic ht have seemed part of the shadows Thenearer He approached until he could see the pattern on the covering rugs, and the pink rims round the mullah's lashless eyes