# Winter India/Chapter 19
### CHAPTER XIX THE END OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE

T was a damp and dreary, a raw and chilly afternoon when we drove away from Kipling's people and waited for an hour in that drafty, echoing fortress—the Lahore railway station. The Northern Railway across the Panjab, being a government line, is subject to delays and alterations of schedule to suit special needs, and the red carpets at hand for the arrival of the "L. G." of the Panjab on the following afternoon promised greater delays had we deferred our start. As all first-class cars are run at a loss on Indian railways, we could not complain at the usual forlorn conveyance; but the rattling window-panes of blue or violet glass, admitting the chill, actinic light, made the shabby car drearier and dingier than usual, and seemed to add degrees of cold to the air. The bleak and stony yellow plain, like the sage-brush and alkali wastes of Nevada, looked snow-covered through these tinted glasses, and the cold, blue, depressing light finally suggested the experiments made with invalids, lunatics, and plants at the time of the blue-glass craze ​and cure of so long ago. It was impossible to read in the jolting carriage, and we could only draw rugs and razais about us and watch the drear landscape roll by as the trucks thundered over the dusty road-bed. The groups on station platforms grew more pinched and more uncomfortable-looking, with cotton clothes more and more voluminous in cut, and streaming with more and more loose ends of extra drapery, as we ran on through the frosty, hazy glow of a sudden yellow sunset that, glorifying the white peaks of Kashmir, faded quickly to a green and a hyacinthine sky, and then to the blackness of winter night. The one weary lamp in the carriage did not give light enough for us to read and lay to heart the several framed ordinances which the government railway holds up to travelers. Evidently there is a "dog question" in British India equal to the "cow question" in the Hindu and Mohammedan circles. "His Excellency the Governor-General in Council" had first to rule:
DOGS IN CARRIAGES
Passengers will not be allowed to take any dog into a passenger carriage, except with the permission of the Station Master at the starting station, and also with the consent of their fellow passengers, and then only on payment of a double fare for each dog, subject to the condition that it shall be removed if subsequently objected to, no refund being given. This rule does not apply to dogs conveyed in reserved compartments, or carriages, or in private special trains. The number of dogs to be taken into a reserved compartment must not exceed three.
And again it was intimated to the public in the formal phrase of a viceregal ball- or dinner-card, by a secretary, who said:
I am directed to state that His Excellency the Governor-General in Council considers it desirable in the interest of the travelling public to rule that in future no person shall be allowed to take any dog into a passenger carriage, except with the consent of the Station Master at starting station and also with the concurrence of the fellow passengers.
At sunrise the next morning we saw the blue range of the Hindu Kush with a sprinkling of snow on its sharp crest-lines, and the same dreary, dry, stony plain around us, broken only by a few clay bluffs and the gullied watercourses of the rainy season. The air was thin, sharp, and frosty as we lowered the rattling blue window-panes for a look at the forlorn adobe village on the banks, and the great fortified bridge across the Indus at Attock—Attock! the ford and crossing-place of every invader and conqueror from the North since Aryan times; where every one of them camped and fought,—Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Scythian, Afghan, and Mogul, down to Nadir Shah. When the train had trailed slowly across the high iron girders and passed through another great fortress bridge-tower, it turned sharply and ran along the bank, giving us a view of the great picturesque front of Akbar's fort on the opposite bluff. Except for that imposing battlemented castle and fortified bridge, the muddy river, the banks, the stony plain, and the blue mountain-range showing so clearly in the thin, dry air, might as well ​have been the country of the upper Missouri; but this plain between the Indus and the Safed Koh has been a world's battle-ground for more than two thousand years, and history is written on top of history like records on a palimpsest. Here at the Indus has always been the virtual frontier of India, the river drawing a natural line from the Himalayas down to the Persian Gulf; but, once advancing here to a valley and there to a range, the frontier has crept westward and northward, and is still ever-moving, changing, and elusive.
At Khairabad station, facing Attock, the early morning tea-table was ready on the platform, and muffled figures bore trays of steaming cups to the car windows, while benumbed travelers surrounded the tall samovar. The wildest lot of turbaned and disheveled folk, some in sheepskin coats and some wound over and looped up with unmanageable yards and yards of loose cotton clothing and loaded down with strange saddle-bags, bundles, water-jars, and hubble-bubble pipes, were already waiting when the train drew up. When the third-class passengers, who had been packed to standing-room all night, were bundled out and added to this waiting crowd while a fresh train was made up, there was spectacle indeed, local color too, and such an uproar as threatened the demolition of the Indian Empire—or at least the sacking of the train and the razing of Khairabad station. The whole traveling public had changed overnight to the fierce Afghan type, which had been so picturesque when first seen in the bazaars of Lahore; and the vehement giants, tur​baned and bearded to exaggeration, ramped up and down the platform with bare feet thrust in loose, clattering Mohammedan shoes, shouldering and hustling one another in no gentle way. Despite the clamor and the crowding, as so many desperate tribesmen stormed and carried each third-class carriage and filled every cubic inch of its space with their own superfluous size and belongings, the train finally drew away, leaving the platform full of leftover passengers—"huge, black-haired, scowling sons of Ben-i-Israel," who raged aloud in their wrath, until one felt sure the station-master must barricade himself and the great guns of Attock thunder across the river before the uproar would subside. These tall, hairy, and noisy creatures, with peaked Afghan caps within their striped turban-cloths, were far removed from the soft and supple Hindus we had left in the South, unlike even the bearded Sikhs at Lahore. We had journeyed overnight to another country, had come again to a blue-eyed people, to the pale Aryans of the Northwest, to a race of weather-beaten and ruddy-cheeked mountaineers, to the Pathans of Kipling's tales—tales so true, pictures so clearly painted, that one recognizes these hairy giants as fascinating old acquaintances, characters in fiction come to life.
Crossing more of the same dreary, yellow plain, and nearing the mountain barrier, the train at last ran by the mud walls of a mud city in a mud plain,—Peshawar, Akbar's "frontier city," the extreme northern outpost of the Indian Empire; nineteen hundred miles from Cape Comorin and two hun​dred and seventy-eight miles from Lahore—the latter distance covered by fast-mail train in seventeen hours. The storied mud walls of the city were like adobe pueblos, and the same dry and treeless plain, dry, thin atmosphere, and glaring white sunlight of the American Southwest blinded us as we drove from the end of the track at the cantonment station to the drooping roses and poinsettias in the dusty gardens of the dak bangla.
By previous correspondence with the commissioner at Peshawar—and here let me bear testimony to the unfailing courtesy, the endless kindness, the considerate interest which every English official in India accords to the winter wanderers—through the kindness of this unknown northern commissioner we had been fully informed of the preparations necessary for a visit to the Khyber, and by dint of many telegrams everything was in train for our arrival. The khansamah at the bangla served his tiffin on the moment, and soon the babu of the political agent was there with the permits to travel the Khyber Pass as far as Ali Masjid on the following caravan day, and with an order for the detail of sowars of Khyber Rifles to act as escort. Straightway we judged horses and made bargains with splendidly whiskered old Hassan Khan at his hospital of broken vehicles in the bazaar, and quoted to him the while the commissioner's warning that the only danger in the Khyber Pass would be from the chance of an unbroken pony being put in harness. The turbaned one, with his hand on his heart, assured us that we should have the most safe and ​stately barouche and pair to convey us to Jamrud, at the entrance of the pass, at sunrise, and that he would speed us on thence toward Afghanistan and the elusive, illusive, ever-moving frontier in light dog-carts of the variety known to the natives as the "tum-tum" (tandem). All this for sixteen rupees, "and what your ladyship may please."
As "that narrow sword-cut in the hills" was open and guarded only on Tuesdays and Fridays, the two caravan days of each week, there was stir in Peshawar city and cantonment that day. Long caravan trains of camels and donkeys were then filing out and across the dusty plain to pass the night in the fortified serai below Jamrud fort, ready for a sunrise start through the defile to Lundi Khana at the Afghan end, where no white traveler goes, save by very special arrangement with civil and military authorities.
Peshawar, once an Afghan city in fact, still bears all its Persian and Central Asian characteristics; and this flat-roofed city within its great mud walls is also a metropolis, a little Paris for all Central Asia, whither flock Afghans and turbaned folk from over the border to shop and spend their money, to luxuriate and dissipate in all the ways of Orient and Occident there combined, and to hatch fresh conspiracies against Pax Britannica, One must read his Kipling to enjoy Peshawar, and must see Peshawar and its people fully to enjoy Kipling. All through "The Man Who Would be King," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "The Man Who Was," "The Lost Regiment," and "Wee Willie ​Winkie," and in the "Ballad of the King's Jest," are pictures and glimpses of Peshawar, the Pathans and the hills, that flash upon one's memory at every turn. With Peshawar, too, are associated all the great names of Anglo-Indian history of the past half-century,—Lawrence, Edwards, Nicholson, and both the Robertses.
The great cantonment at the end of the track is one of the chief military stations of the empire, and while it rejoices in a crisp, electric air worthy of a sanatorium in midwinter, its climate for the rest of the year gives it an evil name. It is another of the many "ovens of India," where the thermometer rises to 102° and 110° every summer, and where the gray, beclouded, breathless dog-days during the rains aggravate men to madness.
After all the other bazaars of India, after the Chandni Chauk of Delhi and the brilliant, theatrical, spectacular streets of Lahore, the bazaars of Peshawar were captivating out of all reason, and held us fascinated until dusk, when lamps and lanterns threw strange illumination upon all the picturesque people known to the Middle East. There was not so much color as at Lahore, perhaps; but the fiercely bearded ones, with their tremendous turbans, long chogas, or caftans, and gay vests, were so many hundreds of Vereshchagin's models turned loose, and kodak film was reeled away by the yard as long as the spool would turn. It was too striking, too theatrical, and too spectacular to be the every-day life at even the farthest end of the empire. Each little open alcove of a shop along the ​broad street leading in from the Edwards Gate in the city wall held its tableau, its Vereshchagin group already posed, every man of them six feet tall, fierce and stalwart. These "Pathan devils," "these Kabul-ly men," as our bearer called them, were as truculent, turbulent, and untamed a lot as one could wish to see, and our bearer fairly quaked when one of these swashbucklers brushed against him, or a hook-nosed, wolfish red-beard scowled at him and contemptuously discussed him with a brother of Kabul. The Jewish cast of features was unmistakable, and the turbans and garments were identical with those worn by Moses and the prophets—a biblical picture, truly. These hulking giants who strode about like conquerors, these picturesque cutthroats and splendid fighting animals, are supposed to be harmless, from having been relieved of their arms and weapons when they entered British territory, but no doubt every one of them had a yard-long, triangular Afghan knife concealed within his baggy garments. All wore peaked caps within the turban-cloth and some heavy, striped blankets thrown theatrically over one shoulder, but the crocheted Afghan of fancy-work fairs was nowhere to be seen—another disillusionment of travel. An unkempt old falconer with hooded bird on wrist, and just such a Scythian sort of barbarian next him as sculptors show in the train of Alexander the Great, were a pair that willingly posed for their portraits.
There was such richness, such conglomeration and embarrassment of picturesqueness on every hand, ​that one needed the all-compassing eyes of a fly to see it. Persia's nearness was attested by the graceful shapes of water-pots, bottles and bowls, the damascened metals and the blue-glazed pottery; and the Russian advance was there in visible, tangible form in the tall copper samovars that steamed and hissed in the frequent tea-shops—the hand of Russia seen in every such gathering-place, and the seeds of sedition lying in every bowl of tea.
Disputing passage with a deliberate ox loaded with twice its bulk of fodder-cane, we came through a deep arch in a wall to the circular Bokhara, or silk bazaar, and to a dazzling picture all light and life and color in the blazing, blinding sunlight of that early, cloudless afternoon. Dens of alcove shops surrounded the great open space, where leafless trees cast thin traceries of shadows over the bare earth, and scores of men sat in groups in the sun, twirling reels of green, yellow, rose, and purple silks, tossing glistening skeins of every hue as they came fresh from traders' packs or dyers' vats. Bales of woven silks and shimmering lengths of gay tissues were heaped and spread over the floors of the tiny shops; and sitting statuesque, or moving in and out among the whirling spindles, were Afghan and Bokhara silk merchants and brokers, who brightened the scene with their gold-threaded and -fringed turban-cloths, gold-embroidered and cloth-of-gold vests and waistcoats, and inner garments of gorgeous Bokhara shadow-silks. From "silken Samarkand," from Bokhara and Kabul, these men come every winter to this silk bazaar, and huge bales of raw silks ​and woven stuffs were being unloaded that afternoon from groaning camels that had trod softly down from the Khanates to kneel in the Peshawar oval—to be reloaded with Manchester piece-goods and tread slowly back again before hot weather.
There were picturesque money-changers, too, in this bazaar—bearded and turbaned old Persians, wrapped in long and richly furred garments, sitting somnolent and prosperous in the sunshine, with loose heaps of coins from all the border countries before them. One even wondered if the rupees and annas, the unknown coins with crescents and Persian texts, and the yet more insidious rubles and copecks were real,—if they were not stage accessories and part of the tableaux rather than the visible capital and assets of genuine Shylocks.
Color was rampant in the shoe bazaar, the long line of cobblers' lairs strewn and strung over with peaked slippers and great strips of brightest red. green, and yellow leathers, and hung in the sunlight to make a braver show. In all that leather bazaar we could not find a pair of the braided leather sandals or buskins that at southern railway stations are sold as Saharanpur or Kashmir shoes, farther north are called Lahore shoes, and in Lahore are called Peshawar shoes. The Pathan public very generally wore the same conventional Mohammedan heelless slippers, with the pointed and curling bows and high sterns of antique junks. Some few wore wood or rawhide sandals fastened by heavy thongs, the most primitive and archaic of foot-gear. There was a narrow strip of railed-off, ​sacred ground down the middle of this shoe bazaar, which held some venerated Moslem tombs, and scores of devout ones, ranging themselves before them, saluted the glowing west beyond which lay Mecca. They prostrated themselves on their bits of carpets, and prayed fervently, deaf to the hum of cobblers and idlers around them.
There were sweetmeat sellers and sugar-cane peddlers hawking their wares through all the bazaars; letter-writers plying their craft in the open; schools of small turbans rocking in studious circles around some pious teacher; and barbers, lawyers, peddlers, touts, and jugglers. And there were beggars, too! Such beggars! Such tattered and picturesque figures as never before diverted one,—Afghan and Bokhara beggars, shaggy and ragged beyond all the religious mendicants of India. Coats of a hundred patches hung in a hundred shreds from the frowzy, turbanless ones, and but half protected them from the keen mountain winds that blew through the bazaars at sunset. Many of these were Pathan "saints," who live in caves in the hills, lead revolts, and urge the murder of unbelievers. The more holy of these beggars cast glances of scorn and hatred at us Kafirs or unbelievers; "white pagans," they called us, to the perturbation of our bearer, who seemed to fear that some one of these Islam saints might brain him with his long pipe-stem, but with six annas and a yard of sugar-cane the maddest molla of them all was bought over to stand tamely before the kodak. A few of the holy men coaxed annas from the crowds with songs and story-telling,—even an ​infidel anna came not amiss,—while others had for sale furs, rugs, and bits of soft jade or heavily-veined turquoise. Not this side of Samarkand had I expected to see men with rugs piled on their heads and shoulders, throwing them down at sight of a possible customer, and displaying there on the dusty ground what treasures or trash they possessed. Men with bales of furs and poshtins, or sheepskin coats, for sale, paraded the bazaars or lounged by gates and bridges. One scowling giant had for sale a dead peacock, a sacred Hindu bird, another showed a leopard-skin; and there were blue-eyed, woolly Persian cats on view, whose dispositions had been so crossed somewhere in transit that they would only spit, glare, and claw at any possible purchasers who ventured near.
The jewelers' dens had their gossiping groups, and the leisurely jewel merchants produced bags, tins, and bottles of seventh-rate pearls and talisman turquoises, cemented on sticks, all quoted at soaring prices. A woman in a gaily-embroidered red and yellow phulkari or Afghan head-sheet, who sat watching the hammering of a bracelet, was a moving exhibit of jewels, that furnished a feast to the eye when combined with her own beauty. But we were plainly no feast to her scornful eyes, and, after a critical inventory of our dusty traveling attire, her glances and shrugs sufficiently translated her remarks to the merchant of high prices and doubtful gems.
THE MAD MOLLA, PESHAWAR
There was a picturesque salt and corn bazaar in a vast open space, and the fragrance and the cheery music of popping corn drew us directly to the booth where, in a huge turban and tremendous trousers, the pop-corn man stirred the snapping kernels with a bunch of twigs in a great, shallow iron pan. The pan rested on the same rude mud oven and was furnished with the same layer of black sand as is used by hot-chestnut men in Peking and all North China. ​Peshawar pop-corn was as edible under its Pushtu name as at the Chicago World's Fair, barring the grit of the black sand driven into every snowy kernel. Sweetmeat shops and peddlers' stands overflowed with gujack and kindred candies, thickly peppered with the dust of the streets.
The caravans bring down the white Kabul grapes which, packed in cotton in small, round wooden boxes, are sold at remotest railway stations all over India each winter; and such mountainous stores of pistachios, almonds, walnuts, raisins, figs, and fruits from fertile Afghan and Persian vales, as made one imagine a great horn of plenty had been tipped through the Khyber Pass and its contents spread over Peshawar plain. For twenty centuries at least the povindahs, or traveling merchants, have brought caravans down from Kabul, Bokhara, and Samarkand every autumn. They bring horses, wool, woolen stuffs, silks, dyes, gold thread, fruits, and precious stones, fighting and buying their way to British lines, where, leaving their arms, they are free and safe to wander at will to Delhi, Agra, and Calcutta, appearing even at Rangoon and Tuticorin each winter. The railway has changed something of their habits now, and all save the horse-dealers leave their animals to graze near Peshawar while they take train to the uttermost parts of the peninsula, and, returning when their wares are sold, lead their camels back to the cool plateaus and valleys of the north for the summer.
Kafila, or caravans, bringing more and more of Afghan wares, were defiling in through the city ​gates, and toward sundown the great square of the caravansary was full of groaning camels, and the loads of merchandise grew to mountain heights. A fountain and a sacred spot of prayer is reserved in the center of the serai, and there caravan-men and camel-drivers cleansed and prayed, their faces to the west, oblivious of all the acre of protesting beasts and wrangling men, screaming peddlers, chanting beggars, and even the shouts of a bear-leader, who danced and wrestled with his shaggy pet to the very edges of the prayer-carpets. The serai's inclosure, the Ghor Kattri, has always been holy ground. On this spot first stood the great vihara of Kanishka's time that was four hundred feet high and a quarter of a mile in circumference, chief fane when all this valley was head center of Buddhism. To it came Pahien and Hiouen Thsang, those Chinese pilgrims of the fifth and seventh centuries, who, crossing Tatary and Turkestan, came down through the Khyber Pass to visit the holy lands of the Buddhist faith. In their time, too, a great suburban stupa sheltered the golden begging-bowl of Sakya-Muni, "the holy grail of Eastern legends," which, brought here from Benares, was carried to Persia, and then is said to have been looted by a marauder and taken to Kandahar; and Mohammedans treasure the so-called Buddha's bowl—a great bronze or iron caldron. Peshawar once had its Bodhi-druma (Tree of Knowledge), descendant of the Bo-tree at Buddha-Gaya, planted by Kanishka, the Scythian ruler of the Panjab, according to one legend; it had already grown ​to a shelter sufficient for Buddha when he appeared to foretell the coming of Kanishka, according to another version. At any rate, it was a pipul-tree of uncommon size, and held in such esteem that the conquering Baber, the Bokharan, saw and described it when he came this way in 1505. All this Peshawar plain has yielded rich store of Buddhist relics, records, sculptures, and inscriptions, including the finest examples shown in the Lahore and Calcutta museums and in London.
The holy spot of Peshawar, in these modern times, is the jail, where so many hillside saints from the border have been put for stalking British sentries, sniping stragglers, and inciting the tribesmen to mischief and revolt in the name of the Prophet, that the great barred building is crowded at times with these vagabonds. As the abode of saints, the building has all the sacredness and vogue of a temple, and is a place of popular pilgrimage. Fanatic Mohammedans have even committed petty crimes in bazaar and cantonment for the sole purpose of gaining admission to this saints' abode and rest: and, with such crazy people to deal with, one may well admire the spectacle of England's humane and patient rule on the border.
From the top of the city wall near the old temple there was a fine view of the city, the hazy, lilac plain, and the snow-striped mountains just showing through the clouds of mingled dust and frost-haze on the Jamrud road. The rugged mountains rose and grew sharper in outline as the sun fell, one higher and whiter peak marking where the Khyber ​cleaves its way through to the Afghan plain of Jellalabad, only forty miles distant. But beyond the Safed Koh lies—Russia! And upon all that northwestern sky we saw projected the great shadow of the double eagle, rather than the Afghan symbol of the tree.
The gold and ruby mists of the plain soon faded to cold violet shadows and purple darkness, and the flat white roofs around us were indefinite when the great demonstration in the sky was over. The crisp autumn air grew momently sharper as we haggled through the gharry door for a last bargain in Bokhara silk, and drove, that January night, to the dark, cheerless, stone-floored dak bangla which stood a thousand feet above sea-level, north latitude thirty-four degrees, Fahrenheit many less.