THE TRAVELLER.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1424, 15 June 1899, Page 11

THE TRAVELLER.

BY G. W. STEEVENS, (Author of "With Kitchener to Khartum”), in " London Daily Mail.”

INDIAN PICTURES.

THE KHYBER. LAND I KOTAL. The front door of India, Bombay, is magnificent; the back-door, the Khyber, ia therefore naturaliy shabby. Out of the rose hedges of Peshawar a dust-yellow road carries you through a dust-grey plain, heading for dust-drab mountains. India seems worn out—giving up the weary effort to be soil, reverting limply to rock, pand, mud. An hour your tonga tongles—there is no other word for its combination of rumble, jolt, jump, spin, and fly—straight for the hilis, which seem, ever toi recede. You mark a point between two ridges as the mouth of the pass; you drive through it, and you are still in the plain: that cap beyond must be the mouth. Then, almost insensibly, you do enter the jaws. Walls of brown rock enclose you on either side; a round hill of brown rock, crowned with a mud fort, blocks you in front; a turn in the road, and a sweeping ridge of brown rock cuts you off behind. Above the walls, beyond the hill, behind the ridge, spring up with every turn other walls, other hills, other ridges, more sheer, more towering, more mazy than the first. You rise and rise, now along the gully of a defile, now sweeping round a run, now zig-zagging over a face, at one moment peeping over a shoulder at the plain behind, the next dashing confidently towards two sky-swallowing khaki-coloured, BLACK-SPANGLED HUMPS that seem to fill all your front. Frowning over your head, slipping away from under youn foot, letting in vast perspectives of more khaki rock and black bush, shutting up the world into two cliffs and an abyss—the Khyber is a mere perplexity of riotous mountain.

You would say these savage hills could support ■nothing but solitude—yet here are the mountaineers. A couple of lithe aquiline young men in khaki and sandals rise out of a heap of stones as you pass, and shoulder Snider muskets. On the hill above and under the mud-walled blockhouse 101 l half-a-dozen more. These are of the Khyber Rifles—Afridis who, now that the war is over, have returned without malice and without abashment to their old service of guarding the pass. They start out at nothing at every wind of the road; on all the lower summits you can just make out khaki pickets against the khaki country. For to-day the pass is very full. Above you, in a short cut between two serpentines of the driving road, you see the ordered columns of a British regiment descending; and at the next turn you almost fling a file of its transport mules over the precipice. Spin down the next decline-, shave the boulder of the angle, and—Ai! toot! wheeze, wheeze, tut! ai, pig!—we are plump in the middle of two meeting caravans entangled IN A COMMISSARIAT TRAIN. The camels from Kabul barracked for the night at Landi Khotal, those from Peshawar, at Jamrud; to-day, which is the open day, they cross in the Khyber. Now comes an hour of steady jostle and shove and bang, of abortive attempts to toot the broken bugle and more successful vilifications of all camels, bullocks, camelmen, bullock-drivers, and all progeni- . tors and collaterals of the same. The down-coming and the up-going camels of course are jammed in a second, and of eourse the drivers do not care. One laden beast balances himself on the eye-brow of the drop and lifts his eyes to heaven in plaintive appeal against the woes of life; the next huddles under the wall and tries to shove it back with a truss of straw, so as to make more room; the next plants himself directly in the middle of the road and squeals in helpless horror as the tonga barges at him. Struggling down to where the road touches the Khyber water imder the mud battlements of Ali Musjid, we enter the stratum of bullock carts just aa they have finally decided that the best thing to do is. to lie down across the path .and let the camels clamber over them. No created thing can make emotion in a commissariat bullock. Twist his tail, hit him ovr the head, heave a tonga-wheel—-half as heavy as a field-gun's—into his flank: he looks meek and remains placidly in the way. When at last the idea of action has penetrated his hide, he methodically hooks his yoke into the nearest wheel with a look of profound meekness, and PLUNGES INTO MEDITATION AGAIN. So the tonga stops and everybody abuses everybody else till they are tired; then they rest a little, and abuse a little more with a fresh breath; finally they unite to unhook the yoke and push the cart unto the bullocks. They, finding the cart moving by itself, are eventually penetrated by an idea again. " It seems brother, they wish us to mov» again.” " Very well, brother; .et us always do what they wish us to do.” And so they move thoughtfully on. The Kabul-bound camels are beneath us now, promenading with dignity along tht bed of the stream. It was worth the delay to look at them. For the camel of Central Asia is the flower of his otherwise discreditable family. His cousin of Egypt and India ie a necessary evil; he is a joy to the eye, and he knows it. They are all weak a leg, all corners and misplaced joints, halfsnake, half folding-bedstead: his daintily tilted nose is thrust out of a shower of rich brown silk fur. It cascades from the ears all down his throat to the chest, like a lady’s boa, only far longer and finer, and especially far better worn. His shoulders and thighs are clothed in brown astrachafi. Altogether he is an animal with contours, not a folding monstrosity; and he knows it* Other camels are tied head to tail on the march: he tramps

along serenely under his heavy load, picking his own way, convinced of the superiority which others only feign, not to be thrown out of his business by anything less devilish than a wheeled double centaur with the voice of a bugle. From Ali-Musjid'the road see-saws, with a balance of ascent, and the pass gradually widens. You begin to pass villages—or THE DRY BONES OF THEM. Jagged stumps of towers and rents where walls were—the record of the punishment of the Afridis. When they took our fort at Landi Kotal they stripped off every stick of wood and carried it away; when we destroyed their towers we did likewise; on these cruel hills wood, next to a rifle, is the most desirable possession life can offer. As you swing up and down the grades of dust you see now and again the black blot of a cave mouth in the hills: these are now the villages of the Khyber Afridis. At last you turn your last corner. In front of you, across folds and rifts in the ground, is a white encampment; to your right you are quite close on a long quadrangular fort, towers at the angles, loopholes along the tall walls, the Union Jack over all. Behind it is another encampment. You have reached the quarters of the Khyber Brigade at the Landi Kotal. You are on the very rim of British India. Behind the elbow of the road is Landi Khana, whither the Afghan escort brings the Kabul caravan: the click of a telegram, the call of a bugle, and British troops could be in Afghanistan again. But we must not talk of themes like these. Meanwhile here are three battalions and a mountain battery and sappers, under the best trusted brigadier in India, every man as fit as the hills can make him, and football ankles the only resource of the hospital. It is not exactly active service, but it is the next best thing to it. The surrounding population is OBEDIENT IN LARGE THINGS and sportive in small. The Shinwari villagers—those are their walls and square tapering forty-foot towers sloping up the branching valley northward—are thoroughly friendly: observing the easy access to their homes and the young corn just greening the dust-colourecl earth you hardly wonder at their virtue. The very Afridis southward submit to the General as their arbiters. They have a custom, when they plough, of meeting in jirgah, where each man lays down a stone before him: while the ploughing lasts the stones axe down and all blood-feuds sleep, a fie other clay, the war with the Sirkar being over, and a feeling abroad that the rifles had been silent too long, they came to the General Sahib for permission to lift the stones and open the each-other-shoot-ing season, "The first village tha; begins will be destroyed,” said he, and they went away sorrowful, but obedient. Only in small things they are a law under themselves: you could hardly expect them to deny themselves the exercise of rirlestealing with a whole brigade of Lte-Mef-fords and Martinis before their very eye 3. So on dark nights the promising young Afridi creeps down towards the sentry, who, if he is sleepy, will be found next morning with a knife in his back instead of a rule. As a rule he is not sleepy, then there are shots, and perhaps shots in return; but, what with the dark and the hillman’s cunning and the danger of shoo - ing at large in camp at night, it is seldom that a rifle thief is bagged. The other day a British sentry was both knifed and beaten over the head with the butt of his own rifle; but he clung to the sling like a Briton, and the Afridi w»nt empty away. All things considered, you had better be wary when going home after dinner in the Kkyber camp. Within tlis perimeter let your "Friend” follow closely on mGurkha’s " Hahlt, huggas theer!” outsit j it they shoot first and challenge afterwards Better take the air by day—say, on a route march with the Gurkhas. Khaki, jackets and short baggy breeches that lea\e a bare knee above the puttias, biack b'-Its, and hunting-horns on their buttons like our Rifles’, bayonet on one hip and kukri on the other, and a tiny round cap worn over the ear and leaving the sun to get through the close-cropped bullet head if he can, the jolly, flat-faced little mountaineers will repay you for more than a morning’s march with them. They leap from stone to stone like he-goats, till you are right up, up below the clouds, and the Khyber country and Afghanistan are unrolled below you. You see, and at length you understand, the campaign against the Afridis. Gad, what a country! NOT A LEVEL YARD FOR MILES and miles and miles. Not a fair field of fire within the whole horizon. Nothing but a welter of naked khaki-coloured mountain. Shale scree giving on to precipice, ridge entangling ridge, height topping height, You toil up a knee-loosening face to the summit— and there is another summit dominating you; up that—and there is another, and yet another, and another. No end, no direction, no security— nothing but exposure and sheer toil. From the white steeps of the Hindu Khush in the sky to the black-dotted wild-olive bushes beside you—not a green thing, not an open place, nothing but hard, sterile, cruel, unoriental fanged impossibility. Only down there, on the other side, the Kabul river threads the mountains in its mail of sunshine. There is level ground and green meadow in the valley; there is Dakka, the first Afghan town, and there, in that huge patch of green, the hazy

shimmer must be Jellalabad. How many marches? Is that blur their cavalry lines? It is easy to be wise about the forward policy from your arm-chair; but go up with a regiment and look out from your barren peaks on to the green plains over the border. You will understand what a frontier feels like, and why frontiers have a habit of not standing still.