and dismissed for the day, Dost Mohammed looked out over his city. Dost Mohammed, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, son of Usaf, son of Yaru, son of Mohammed, son of Omar, son of Khizar, son of Ismail, son of Nek, son of Daru, son of Saifal, son of Barak, son of Abdal, Abdal the Great, father of the Afghans, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind, Emperor of the distant horizons; Dost Mohammed looked over the city in his easy splendour, and, in the empty room, let his marvellous mind fill with guile. No noise of feeling crumpled his face, and he thought as long as he could about the English. They, surely, would be useful; the heavy useful English, having money and guns and land, could usefully help the Amir to stay just as he was, just where he was, and continue in his usual ways, without offering interference, preventing trouble without knowing, exactly, what they were doing. Presently the call of the imam to prayer drifted up from the city. Dost Mohammed began, quite slowly, on his devotions. As he rose and fell, his head lifting and dropping over the divine flawed complexity of the prayer-mat, his lips muttering in the empty room, his mind continued to dwell, quite properly, on punishment. It was the Amir’s duty each night to determine the punishments to be visited on wrongdoers the next day, and it was to this which, in prayer, he now turned his mind. From the mosques in the city, a rumbling muttering of prayer filled the city with noise, thousands of the devout rising and falling, a single huge multiple sound, and Dost Mohammed rose and fell in prayer, and thought of violence. The wrongdoers the next day were a various bunch. Low thieves, the adulterous twelve-year-old wife of one of the sons of the Amir, the rebellious chief of a tribe whose lands lay just within the uncertain shifting borders of the kingdom. Hanging and beheading and dragging behind horses for the thieves, as was ordained. The adulterous princess to be thrown down the well of the Bala Hissar itself.
And, for the seditious leader – Dost Mohammed thought hard. He despised rebellion, because it always failed; and failure was what Dost Mohammed despised most, being a blot on the face of God. His head lifted and lowered above the glowing ruby prayer-mat, and for the moment he could not think of any punishment. Then he remembered the decreed fate of Sayad Ata, in his youth; he had been caught in rebellion. His fate had been to be tied down on his breast while an elephant trampled on him. Dost Mohammed, deep in prayer, remembered the devout, righteous and splendid sight of the death of Sayad Ata; how the unworthy descendant of the Prophet himself had groaned and wailed at the approach of the beast! How his followers had groaned in the crowd, not understanding where the path of right had led, as if a thousand elephants were approaching, to tread on them! How his shrieks had been stopped, like a finger placed over the hole in a leaking whistling goatskin, as his bones, all at once, had cracked and popped! How grand and dreadful the sudden gouts of blood from every orifice, bursting out like a spirit-witness to the Faith, spilling into the dust! How right and good, the decreed end of Sayad Ata! Rising and falling in his devotions, his mind filling with the happy contemplation of the exercise of justice and right, the Amir quite forgot that some other means of execution would have to be found for tomorrow’s rebellious tribesman, there being, at the moment, no imperial elephant to be had. What had happened to the imperial elephant Dost Mohammed could not, for the moment, quite recollect; whether the dingy, foul-tempered, foul-smelling and noisy beast had been borrowed by some fool son, given to another recalcitrant tribe as an expensive joke, or had simply wandered off into the hills, Dost Mohammed could not think, so firmly fixed was his mind on the imperial devotions, the imperial punishments. But soon the great Amir, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, all the way back to Abdal and the Heir of Israel himself, would have to think up some new way of putting the better class of criminal to death. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would ask the infidel if he wanted to come and see the executions. Tomorrow, indeed, he would ask the infidel how criminals were put to death in Engelstan. The infidel, after all, was bound to be full of ingenious new ideas.
At the other side of the city, the infidel was sitting or standing, and not saying anything much. Gerard had taken off his full dress uniform, and was sitting in his long thick smalls, holding but not reading a book; his mouth pursed in concentration, he was staring over the top, examining the clean rough floor. Mohan Lal had absented himself, and was in the latrines. Burnes, standing at the window, was giving way to an unfamiliar sensation, the slow scarlet flashes of terror. He had expected relief after his audience with the Amir. He had met emperors before, had met with the great of the Company and the Government. He had been ushered into the presence of the jewelled savage potentates of the East, had sat with tyrants whose teeth were blacked and pointed, as with the blood of their own children, and each time, before, had experienced the same sequence of events. Before, there had been a sort of dread, suppressed by the will like a child’s balloon held to the ground by a spreading fist; then the willed exercise of confidence as the great savage potentate, whether a pantomime cannibal king or a savage director of the Company in his Bloomsbury palace, turned his eyes to the pink-and-white stripling and listened to the cautious opinions, buried in carefully lavish flatteries. And afterwards, that sense of relief, as the fist let the balloon go and the dread flew away, away, leaving only a nervous flurry of chat.
Now Burnes did not want to chat. He felt no relief. He felt no nervousness. He felt only the same terror he had felt before they had set off for the Amir’s palace, and the kindness of the Amir only augmented the terror he had felt at his quizzing presence. All at once, he felt the full imperial splendour of the Amir’s mind, of which he had been permitted to glimpse only the merest fraction; he had recognized that here was no ostentatious potentate, but the weight and show of the imperial, the Napoleonic mind up there could not be greater if it buried itself in rubies. He was not, to be perfectly honest, quite sure what if anything had happened to them, up there in the Bala Hissar; only that tomorrow it was going to happen again. Tomorrow, they would go back, and tomorrow it would be the same. He would walk through the hard-packed mud streets, corralled between horses, walking between hot flanks in his thick shining uniform, and feel himself drenched in sweat and dread.
There was an itch there in him, there, in his hands, and, for the first time since arriving in Kabul, he went to his pack, and took out his notebook, a knife, and the last scrap of a pencil. Slowly, paying no attention to the others in the room, he cut away at the stump, baring the lead, and then squatted on the floor. He took the pencil in his itching hand, and began to write.
‘The Afghans,’ he wrote, ‘are a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another, and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs. No people are more incapable of managing an intrigue. I was particularly struck with their idleness; they seem to sit listlessly for the whole day, staring at each other; how they live it would be difficult to discover, yet they dress well, and are healthy and happy.’
While he wrote, the itch, the uneasy fear, seemed to pass, as he described what he was so certain of, and seemed to bring the Afghans who surrounded them, every one under the point of his pencil. Now, as he wrote, they were a nation of children, and he, describing them, felt for the moment quite safe. But as he stopped and stared at the wall, the feeling returned. ‘I imbibed a very favourable impression,’ he wrote, ‘of their national character.’
10.
Under the lighted window, five squatting men sat, their attention focused on the eldest of them, his beard thick and square and white on his brown face, like a silver spade. Sadiq, older than he could tell, was telling them a story. His stories were not princesses in gardens and wizards and magic rings, but stories of this city, stories of the past. He was telling them what their fathers had told them many times, the story of how the brave, the great Futteh Khan, great brother of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, met his end at the hands of the stinking enemy. They knew the story, had heard it a hundred times, from their fathers, their mothers, and, dozens of times, many many dozens of times, sitting just here, squatting against the wall, listening to just such a storyteller as the fierce-eyed Sadiq, rousing them to vengeance, muttering into the listening night. ‘And when the Vizier Futteh Khan returned, the treacherous Prince Kamran, chief of the stinking Suddozyes, he fell on him, and seized him, and his eyes were put out. And when he was blind and powerless he was not left to wander the deserts to beg for pity, powerless as he was, but
