TO TOORKISTAN!
The pen of Scott would have failed to describe, and the pencil of
Gustave Doré to depict, the anguish of the poor hostages, when, at
the behest of Ackbar, and at the very time the long prayed-for
succour was coming, they were compelled to set out on their sorrowful
journey towards the Land of Desert.
"Oh, my poor children--my helpless lambs--my fatherless little ones!"
one would cry, folding in her loving arms her scared, pale, and
half-starved brood, gathering them to her while they were yet _her
own_, "even as a hen gathereth her chickens."
"My husband--my husband! shall we never meet again?"
"My poor 'Bob,' or 'Bill,' or, it might be, 'Tom,'" some soldier's
wife would exclaim, "I shall never see the likes of you more,
darling;" for though Tom perhaps drank all his pay, and gave Biddy
now and then "a taste of his buff belt," he "was an angel, compared
to a naygur, anyhow!"
But the majority of the hostages were ladies, and some of them were
like Lady Macnaghten and Sir Robert Sale's daughter, who were
widows--who had lost alike husband and children, and mourned as those
only mourn who have no hope. And now many a quaint pet name, known
best in the nursery ami to the playfulness of the loving heart, was
mingled with the most solemn of prayers.
"Death--death were better than this!" would be the despairing cry of
some; and, ere their sad journey ended, death came to more than one
of that devoted band.
For in one or two instances, despite the piteous entreaties of the
ladies, some soldiers--those very men whom the 13th had subscribed
their rupees at the drum-head to ransom--whose weakness from wounds
or bodily illness rendered them incapable of riding or marching were
shot by the wayside, and left unburied, even as so many lamed horses
or diseased dogs which were useless might have been. One or two, who
were weary of life, entreated to have it ended thus, and all whom the
Dooranees destroyed thus in obedience to Ackbar's orders and the grim
law, perhaps, of necessity, died peacefully and piously--sick of
their present existence, and hopeful of the future; but the women
screamed, lamented, and prayed, seeking to muffle their ears when the
death-shots rang in the mountain wilderness.
Mabel Trecarrel was weak and ailing too, but she was much too
valuable a species of commodity to be shot out of hand, like a poor
Feringhee soldier, even though quite as much a Kaffir and infidel as
he might be; so she was tenderly borne in a palanquin which had been
found in the cantonments, and which contained every comfort and
appliance for travelling--little drawers for holding clothes or food,
and even a mirror, though she never looked at it.
Like a few more, she was silent in her grief, and found a refuge in
tears.
The wedded wife might utter loudly and despairingly the name of her
husband, and the parent that of the dead or absent child, finding a
relief for the overcharged heart in sound; but, even in that terrible
time, the poor betrothed girl could only whisper, in the inmost
recesses of her breast, of the lover she never more might see, and
gaze backward with haggard eyes on the features of the landscape with
which they had both become familiar--the hills of Beymaru, the ridges
of the Black Rocks, and the smiling valley of Cabul, as they all
lessened and faded away in the distance, while slowly but surely,
under a watchful and most unscrupulous guard, the train of prisoners,
on active Tartar horses or plodding Afghan yaboos, in swinging
dhooleys and curtained litters of other kinds, wound among the
mountains on their way to Toorkistan, the frontiers of which were
only about a week's journey distant.
And what was the prospect before them?
Separation and distribution, to be bartered for horses, or sold into
slavery and degradation; the few men among them, irrespective of
rank, to be the bondsmen, syces, carpet-spreaders, and grooms, hewers
of wood and drawers of water: the women, if young, to be the veriest
slaves of ignorant and unlettered masters, as yet unseen and unknown;
if old, to become nurses and drudges to the women of the Usbec
Tartars: and all these were Christians, and civilised subjects of the
Queen; many of them accomplished, highly bred, nobly born, and
tenderly nurtured.
Terrible were the emotions of the English mother, who, circumstanced
thus, looked on her pure and innocent daughters and thought of what a
week might bring forth!
Yet such were the fates before them--the fates that even the quickest
marching of our troops might fail to avert; for were not the Afghans,
as they heard, again disputing every inch of the Passes with a
desperation which proved that Lord Auckland's policy, and that of the
"peace at any price party" at home, would never have availed with
those who deemed diplomacy but cowardly cunning, treaties as trash,
bribes as fair "loot," and all war as legal fraud?
The lamentations of the women at times, when mingled and united (for
grief is very infectious), roused even the usually phlegmatic Saleh
Mohammed, who rode in the centre of the caravan, perched between the
humps of a very high camel.
"In the land to which you are going, of course, you shall find
neither Jinnistan, the Country of Delight, nor its capital, the City
of Precious Stones; neither will fruits and sweet cakes drop into
your mouths, as if you sat under the blessed tree of Toaba, which is
watered by the rivers of paradise," said he, half scoffingly; "but
you will see the vast sandy waste of the Kirghisian desert, which to
the thirsty looks like a silvery sea in the distance; and some of you
may happily see the city of Souzak, which contains five hundred
houses of stone, and I doubt if the Queen of the Feringhees has so
many in her little island. Barikillah! and you will see the black
tents and the fleecy flocks of the Usbec Tartars, for they are
numerous as leaves in the vale of Cashmere."
And thus he sought to console them when, on the evening of the first
day's journey, they halted at Killi-Hadji, on the Ghuznee road (only
seven miles westward from Cabul), and so called from the killi, or
fort of mud that guards its cluster of huts. It was approached by
narrow and tortuous lanes overhung by shady mulberry-trees; and
there, beside the walls of the fort, they bivouacked for the night.
The deep crimson glory of sunset was over; but the flush of the
western sky lengthened far the purple shadows of tree, and rock, and
hut, even of the tall camels, ere they knelt to rest, across the
scene of the bivouac, which was not without its strong aspect of the
quaint and picturesque, albeit the sad eyes of those who looked
thereon were sick of such elements, as being associated with all
their most unmerited miseries.
Unbitted, with leather tobrahs, or nose-bags filled with barley,
hanging from their heads, the patient horses were eating, while the
hardier yaboos grazed the long grass that grew in the lanes and waste
places.
Fires were lighted, and around them all of the Dooranee guard, who
were not posted in the chain of sentinels, sat cross-legged, smoking
hempseed, cleaning their arms, fixing fresh flints or dry matches to
their musket-locks; others were industriously picking out of their
furred poshteens those active insects of the genus _pulex_, called by
the Arabians "the father of leapers," while the flesh of a camel,
which had been shot by the way, as useless--its feet being wounded
and sore--sputtered and broiled on the embers for supper, and the
light from the flames fell in strong gleams and patches on the
strange equipment, the swarthy turbaned faces, and gleaming eyes of
those wild fellows, whose shawl-girdles bristled with arms and
powder-flasks, and some four hundred of whom were furnished with
muskets and bayonets.
A spear stuck upright in the earth--its sharp point glittering like a
tiny red star--indicated the head-quarters, where, muffled in his
poshteen and ample chogah, with a piece of thick xummul folded under
him, Saleh Mohammed Khan, propped against the saddle of his camel,
prepared, with pipe in mouth, to dose away the hours of the short
August night.
Most, if not nearly all, the lady captives, wore now, of necessity,
the Afghan travelling-dress, a large sheet shrouding the entire form,
having a bourkha, or veil of white muslin, furnished with two holes
to peep through; and with those who, muffled thus, sat in kujawurs,
or camel-litters, the semblance of their orientalism was complete.
From time to time, dried branches or cass--a prickly furze grass
which grows in bunches--were cast upon the fire, causing the flames
to shoot up anew, on the pale faces of the prisoners and the dark
faces of their guards, till at last the embers died out and the white
ashes alone remained; and such was the scene which, like a species of
phantasmagoria, met the eyes of Mabel Trecarrel, when, in the still
watches of the night, she drew back the curtains of her palanquin and
looked forth occasionally. But the stars began to pale in the sky;
its blue gave place to opal tints; the sun arose, and after the
Mohammedans had said their prayers with their faces towards Mecca,
and the Christians with their eyes bent towards the earth or to
heaven, once more the heartless march was resumed, in the same order
as on the preceding day, through a pass in the mountains, and from
thence across the beautiful valley of Maidan.
Saleh Mohammed, though a Khan, having once been a Soubadar in Captain
Hopkins's Afghan Levy (from which he had deserted to the party of
Ackbar Khan, at the beginning of the troubles), had some ideas of
military order and show: thus he had at the head of the caravan--for
it resembled nothing else--six Hindostanees, furnished with some of
our drums and bugles gleaned up in the Khyber Pass, and with these
they made the most horrible noises for several miles at the
commencement and close of each day's march; but even this medley of
discordant sounds failed to extract the faintest smile from the
hostages--even from Major Pottinger and the few soldiers--so sunk
were they in heart and spirit now.
In the Maidan valley they rode between fields of golden grain
bordered by towering poplars and pale willows. Bare, bleak-looking
mountains undulated in the distance, and the poor ladies eyed them
wistfully.
Were these the borders of dreaded Toorkistan?
They proved, however, to be only a portion of the Indian Caucasus,
the extremity of which, the Koh-i-baba, a snow-clad peak, rises to
the height of sixteen thousand feet above the level of the Indian Sea.
That night Saleh Mohammed chose a pleasant halting-place for them,
influenced by some sudden emotion of pity. There they were supplied
with plums, wild cherries, peaches, and the white apricot which has
the flavour of rose water. But ere morning there was an alarm; a
confused discharge of musketry was fired in every direction at
random, all round the bivouac; one or two bullets whistled through
it. A dhooley-wallah was shot dead, and several red arrows, barbed
and bearded, stuck quivering in the turf; yells were heard, and then
a furious galloping of horses passing swiftly away in the distance.
It was a chupao--a night attack planned by some of the Hazarees, a
wild and independent Tartar tribe, whose thatched huts lie sunk and
unseen on the hill slopes, and on whose confines they had halted.
They are all good archers, and, though armed with the matchlock,
usually prefer the bow.
They are bitter foes of the Afghans, and had hoped, by making a dash,
to cut off some of their prisoners; but Saleh Mohammed was too wary
for them, and on that evening had doubled his guards ere the sun went
down.
The 2nd of September found the train traversing the Kaloo Mountain,
one in height only inferior to the Koh-i-baba. From thence, over a
vast chaos of wild and terrific hilly peaks that spread beneath them
like the pointed waves of a petrified sea, they could view, at last,
and afar off, the plains of Toorkistan--the land of their future
bondage; and anew the wail of grief and woe rose from them at the
sight.
The following day, that the absurd might not be wanting amid their
misery, to the surprise of all, Saleh Mohammed appeared mounted on
his camel, not in his usual amplitude of turban, with his flowing
chogah and Cashmere shawls, but with his lean, shrunken, and bony
figure buttoned up in a tight regimental blue surtout, with gold
shoulder-scales, and crimson sash, frog-belt, and sword, all of which
had whilom belonged to Jack Polwhele, of the Cornish Light Infantry,
a tiny forage cap (which Jack used to wear very much over his right
ear) being perched on the back of his bald head, while the chin-strap
came uncomfortably only below the tip of his high hooked nose; and
thus arrayed he prepared to meet and, as he hoped, duly to impress
Zoolficar Khan, the governor of the town of Bameean, where the first
halt was to be made for further and final orders from Ackbar, as to
whether the hostages should be sold or slain; for now their custodian
began to have some strange doubts upon the subject, and now his
victims were fairly out of Afghanistan and in the land of the
Tartars, nine days of monotonous and arduous journey distant from
Cabul.
We have lately seen the kind of mercy meted out to helpless hostages
by Communal savages in the boasted city of Paris--the self-styled
centre of civilization--and so may fairly tremble for the fate of
those who were in the hands of Asiatic fanatics on the western slopes
of the Hindoo-Kush.