Winter India/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THROUGH KHYBER PASS WITH THE CARAVANS
NE who reads much of British and Anglo-Indian print learns that the Indian Empire is not only bounded on the north by the Himalayas and their continuation, the Hindu Kush, but that running with these lofty boundaries are artificial, imaginary lines marking the administrative, the defensive, the strategic, political, geographic, actual, military, temporary, and prospective frontiers. Then, too, says Lord Curzon (London Times, December 20, 1894): "Our frontier must be, not hypothetical, fluctuating, adventitious, but definite, recognizable, scientific," adding yet more to the list of qualitative adjectives commonly applied to the word frontier—never meaning anything, however, but the northwest frontier, in Anglo-Indian speech. One might naturally wish to see the region of such an aggregation of frontiers, where boundaries run like contour-lines on a topographic map—the wavering, imaginary lines upon the earth's Asiatic surface, for which, and to which, literally, millions of lives have been sacrificed—expressions of an "idea" for which many more lives must be given.
One hears, too, the Russian advance daily discussed and harped upon all over India, until it becomes as real a fact as the Aryan migration or the Mogul invasion, and one wishes to see where the next great history-making incident will certainly occur—the theater where the greatest world-drama since Timur's time will be played. One becomes so familiar with this fixed idea of the Russians coming down through the Khyber Pass and snatching the great jewel of the British crown, that he can jest with British friends about all Anglo-India lying awake of nights, frightened by the Russian bogy, and can advise them to rent the Panjab to Russia outright, and so have it over with quickly, and enjoy sound sleep again. But the Briton takes his northwest frontier—his many frontiers—seriously, sees the Russian hand in every little border war, and finds no humor in the charge that every time he cries, "The Russian! The Russian!" as Afridis, Waziris, and Kafirs revolt, he is playing the part of the boy who too often cried, "The wolf! The wolf!"—albeit this boy claims to have found many incriminating documents and positive proof of the trail of the Muscovite wolf in the abandoned camps and villages of warring tribesmen.
It was bitterly cold that night in the government house of rest for travelers; and as the two opposite doors of our grand salon of a room gave directly upon garden and court, we had sweeps of icy air through it whenever a servant entered, and such currents across the floor from two-inch cracks below each door that we soon retreated to the high string-beds, and, wrapped in rugs and razais, longed for steam-heated and furnace-cheered America. The small pocket of a fireplace sheltered some hissing green twigs that smoldered and filled the room with smoke which refused to escape by a transom window sixteen feet up in the absurdly high, windward wall—which same north window was ropeless and wedged open to encourage further the icy drafts that encircled us. The khansamah, bearing the courses of the dinner, was swept in with a small gale each time, but we dined well on the usual Indian menu. The khansamah made a final entry on the wings of the wind, bearing proudly the proper British tart of conclusion. "But, missis—" he pleaded in injured tones when I too had said, "No, thanks." I had too often suffered in arguments with British pastry to hazard it in far places, but I relented to this courteous old soul and gave the heavy serving-spoon the swing and force of a golfer's club, when pouf! pou-s-sh! went a fountain spray of minute flakes of true puff-paste up into the air and down in showers all over the table. And we gathered them up— every last flimsy flakelet—and with praises consumed the khansamah's masterpiece, the very apotheosis of covered apple-pie, the most supremely perfect tart the British flag ever floated over—away off there in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, on the borderland of the heart of the world, close to the old Aryan home of the pie people's first ancestors.
"Pie, sir," said Henry Ward Beecher, "goes with civilization; where there is no civilization, there is no pie." Hence Peshawar, etc.; and one more count may be added to the great total of what England has done for India.
In what seemed only the middle of that arctic night we heard our servant beating on the cook-house door with such an alarum as might herald the coming of the Russians; and after the misery of a candle-light breakfast we drove away in the frosty dawn, the sun rising behind us in a haze of pink and purple, lilac and burning crimson, as we made straight toward the mountain wall. The carriage-road to Jamrud fort runs for all the ten miles close beside the caravan track, on which were lines of slow-moving camels, enveloped in clouds of glorified golden dust—a fine, loose sort of powder, as light and dry and white as flour or snow, covering the broad caravan track five and six inches deep. Every one abroad was beating his arms and stamping his feet to keep warm, and we soon shrouded our heads in rugs as shelter from the icy wind and choking dust, and to hide from our sight the path of the projected railway which travelers now use to Jamrud.
At Jamrud fort, towering picturesquely at the edge of the plain, we gave up the spacious carriage and waited for guard-mount and the signal-shot to declare the Khyber open for the day. This last British outpost was apparently the frontier. We must then have been close to Afghanistan. But no. Lord Curzon had written (London Times, January 2, 1895), "Without exaggeration it may be said, that where Afghan territory commences, there British territory ends, and that the true British frontier is not at Jamrud, but at Lundi Khana." Yet the political agent would not let us go even to that edge of India and look over; would only guarantee our safety to and let us drive as far as Ali Masjid, half-way to Lundi Khana. A merely hypothetical frontier that of Ali Masjid, and Jamrud nothing but the administrative frontier.
The native officer on duty at the Jamrud gates took our passes and presented the visitors' book, in which register it was written and underscored: "Gentlemen visiting Khyber Pass are requested not to give money to the sowars, as it is setting a dangerous precedent"—advice which seemed reasonable when my special military escort for the day appeared, climbed up promptly on the back seat of a tum-tum, and laid his Enfield rifle across his knee. We felt the need of arms ourselves when we saw that handsome, evil, reckless-looking young bandit playing knight-errant for the day, tidily dressed in brown khaki unifonn, his fine turban-cloth fringed with gold, and his lean, Israelitish face lighted with the evil eye of generations of robber ancestors.
Low ridges before us rose to hills, and they to mountains, and three miles away at Kadam is the real entrance, the beginning of the pass that leads to Afghanistan and the mystic lands of Central Asia, through which a procession of conquerors have come. Out there have gone only the British, bent on punitive expeditions and to the questionable triumphs of what Sir Charles Dilke calls, "thrashing the Afghans into loving us."
No other mountain-pass in the world has had and retains such strategic importance and holds so many historic associations as this Khyber gateway to the Indian plain. In the thirty-three miles of its length it cuts through cliffs of shale and limestone rock, and from an elevation of sixteen hundred and seventy feet above the sea at Jamrud it rises to thirty-three hundred and seventy-three feet at Lundi Kotal, beyond Lundi Khana, and is never closed by snow in winter. One does not see snow-fields nor glaciers, nor the wild, stupendous scenery that such a pass in such a mountain-range should have. The winter is the season of greatest caravan trade and travel, since the original, woolly, two-humped Bactrian camel, native of the Pamirs, does not endure hot weather well, and, as in North China, can only travel at night in midsummer, while he performs his longest journeys in winter.
This mountainous borderland between India and Afghanistan is occupied by the independent tribes, who yield allegiance to neither emperor nor amir, who never have been nor will be brought thoroughly under subjection. Numbering over two hundred and fifty thousand, all Mohammedans, easily inflamed through religious fanaticism, and ready to respond to any jehad, or holy war, these independent border tribes are to be counted with on every occasion. The twenty thousand Afridis living in the immediate Peshawar frontier are the most turbulent, fanatical, irresponsible tribe of all, ever ripe for revolt, always scheming and conspiring, ready to attack the power that supports them with subsidies,—literally quarreling with their own bread and butter, or, what is more vital, with their own powder and shot. Loot, ambush, and murder, rick-burning and cattle-poisoning are daily or nightly amusements of these fire-worshipers turned fire-eaters, who have waylaid, harried, and hung on the rear of every body of troops that ever entered this defile—even turning Alexander the Great away from the Khyber, so that Bucephalus was forced to pick his steps to northward and eastward and bear his master down through the Michni Pass to the Peshawar plain. They have always lived by pillage and blackmail, taking a subsidy to guard and protect the British transport trains in the last Afghan war, and then plundering the baggage and commissariat trains every night, cutting off and sniping every straggler and deserter with as much zeal as they had shown in robbing Shere Ali's train. The stealing of arms and ammunition goes on all along the Peshawar border, neither Sepoys nor English soldiers proving any match for these accomplished thieves, descended from generations of freebooters and plunderers, dedicated to the craft by regular ceremonies at birth, and holding skill in that line as their greatest pride and boast. They have stolen the carbines of European guards sleeping on those arms in the guard-house, taking even the sword of the sentry as he rested it against the wall beside him; and they maintain a steady freemasonry of communication with the British troops through spies and confederates in the native regiments and deserters returned to their tribes. Any saint or akhoond or Mad Molla can inflame them and start them on a religious crusade against the infidel, and every little hill village has its saint or saint's tomb to make it a place of distinction and pious pilgrimage. It is even told of one clan of Afridis that, lacking such pious attraction in their village, they lured a saint their way, killed him, and set up a tomb worthy of neighborly envy.
"Nothing is finer than their physique, or worse than their morals," wrote Sir II. Edwards long ago; and Sir Richard Temple has said: "Now these tribes are savages, noble savages perhaps, and not without some tincture of virtue and generosity, but still absolutely barbarians, nevertheless. They have nothing approaching to government or civil institutions; they have, for the most part, no education; they have nominally a religion, but Mohammedanism as understood by them is no better, or perhaps is actually worse, than the creeds of the wildest races of the earth. In their eyes the one great commandment is blood for blood, and fire and sword for all infidels."
"We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood, but we will never be content with a master," said one of these turbulent turbans to Elphinstone; and the Amir was well rid of the lot when the Gandamak Treaty in 1879 declared these tribes independent, nominally under the political control of the British, who have vainly tried the policy of conciliation and subsidy varied with occasional thrashings. Only personal influence, and rough and ready, quick justice can avail with them. Colonel Warburton held them wonderfully in check for twenty years by a kindly, paternal rule, and their confidence in him justified the saying that his presence on the frontier was worth any ten garrisons. He retired when his age limit was reached, and on the heels of his departure came the revolt of the tribes and the closing of the Khyber. Colonel Warburton offered his services to return to India and try to pacify the tribes again, but they were declined, and the border war continued from July, 1897, to January, 1898, General Lockhart for months employing against these hill guerrillas a greater army than that which defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
"The forward party" of Anglo-Indians argues that these border tribes are an inexhaustible recruiting-ground of the finest fighting material in the world, and that for the British not to avail themselves of it would be virtually giving Russia this almost ready-made army. Another faction argues that the tribesmen, once drilled and taught the tactics of war, will be more formidable enemies of the British than ever, more ready to revolt, to join Afghans or Russians. Lugubrious prophets declare that when the struggle comes the British must win the first battle in Afghanistan or lose all India—the Mohammedan Nizam of Hyderabad, with his great army, being arbiter of the destinies of India, in any serious disturbances that may arise with Mohammedans on the northwest frontier. One specialist even wrote out and tabulated his fears in a "confidential book" to his government, in which he figured out every detail of the probable Russian transport problems, their line of march, the points of attack, and their possible resistance. A copy of this confidential and reliable guide to the conquest of India was promptly obtained by the Russian government, translated and sent broadcast through the Russian army as a manual of tactics, a handy sort of military Murray for Muscovite use when the Czar is quite ready for another winter visit to India. Russia has now reached the Pamirs and the borders of Kashmir; Bokhara is hers, and Persia, virtually; exploring parties of Russian soldiers have twice crossed the Hindu Kush, surprised of course to find they were in India, within British lines; and Kipling has depicted the Russian spy in "The Man Who Was," in which the retiring Dirkovich says, "Au revoir!" and, pointing to the Khyber, adds, "That way is always open."
The conquest of India is the dream and the duty of all Russians, and having closely followed every other clause of advice in that remarkable and much-questioned paper known as the will of Peter the Great, they are not once forgetting this one:
VIII. Bear in mind that the commerce of India is the commerce of the world, that he who can exclusively control it is the dictator of Europe; no occasion should therefore be lost to provoke war with Persia, to hasten its decay, to advance to the Persian Gulf, and then to endeavor to re-establish the ancient trade of the Levant through Syria.
While England has been pushing her frontiers northward for the good of the native, and to give the Pathans good government, schools, hospitals, pure water, and sanitary redemption generally, Russia, the pure philanthropist, is pushing her frontiers southward with the sole object of evangelizing the Khanates and bringing these people out of spiritual darkness.
Through the efforts of Colonel Warburton, for twenty years the political agent at Peshawar (and a worthy successor of those other splendid examples of the British official, Lawrence, Edwards, and Nicholson, and those rare men of earlier border and Mutiny days), the marauding tribesmen were taken in firm hand when their independence was guaranteed. The Afridis themselves were made to guard and guarantee the safety of travelers in the Khyber, one of the most remarkable examples of setting a thief to catch a thief that was ever known. From 1879 to 1897 the government paid an annual subsidy of eighty thousand rupees to the Afridi and Shinwari clans on condition that they keep open and guard the caravan track through the pass, live in peace, and do not raid British territory. By tolls levied on each camel and vehicle passing Jamrud, the Indian government raised annually an amount sufficient to pay off part of the subsidy and maintain "Colonel Warburton's road," as the tribesmen call it. Following easy grades, this road could be as easily traversed by an artillery train as by light tum-tums; although, to avoid expensive cuttings and tunnels, the projected railway into Afghanistan will follow the track of Alexander the Great along the Kabul River and through the Michni Pass.
CARAVANS IN THE KHYBER PASS
Bugle-calls and rifle-shots announced that the pass was open, the gates of the serai below Jamrud swung back, and some six hundred scornful and unhappy-looking camels, with great shags of fur on neck and legs, dragged their deliberate way out, and in single file went swaying along the road to Afghanistan. Each belled leader was led by a man on foot, and other camels were fastened one to another by long guide-ropes. Groups of shaggy caravan-men paused to pray by a wayside shrine at the outset of their journey, and then trudged on, they no better groomed, no more sociable or joyful than their camels.
Our bearer was in a panic of fright. "Yes, you must drive fast," he said, with chattering teeth and timorous looks over his shoulder. "I tell you true. I am your servant, not your enemy. These Kabul-ly men are all Russians, enemies of the country, bad and dangerous. They shoot—bang! They kill—bang! every time. They always rob. Hold fast your money. Let no one see your watch to-day. These Kabul-ly men are not men. They are animals—wild animals of the jungle. They fight, they cut, they shoot!—oh! oh!"
"But there is the sowar and his gun. We need not be afraid," I said.
"Yes," said the trembling Hindu, "that is just the danger. All these Pathans are devils. Sowar one day, robber next day. They take England's money; shoot and rob England's men. They are all Russians, enemies of the country. Just now the sowar is England's soldier. Four-o'clock gun goes bang! and he is wild man again, England's enemy."
The smooth, hard carriage-road wound farther in among the yellow hills, and the camel-train was soon far behind and out of sight. We were as an advance-guard, the first passengers of the day, and the riflemen sitting on the rocks and perched on hill crests every hundred yards exchanged greeting glances with the sowar that sent more cold chills down the inert Hindu spine. There were round stone towers and square mud towers of defense as thick as sentry-boxes, and the khaki clothes and turbans, toning in with the stones and barren ground, made many of the sentries invisible until we saw a gun-barrel move or a bayonet flash. It was a radiant, perfect, sunny day, the sky one vast pale turquoise, soft and pure and gently blue, and in among the hills the air was still, and only fresh enough to make the swift ride exhilarating. Around Kadam's mud hovels there were innumerable caves in the hills, where hermits had lived in meditation in Buddhist days, and where Mohammedan saints of unwashed and doubtful sanctity now spend lives of leisure, enjoying the climate and view, subsisting on villagers' offerings, and giving themselves to much mad exhortation, animadversion of England's rule, and mouthings of Allah il allah!
There the pass really begins—a narrow ravine which runs between steep heights. Battlemented walls and far fortresses on crests suggested all the frontiers we had come to see, but it was a deserted road. There was no procession of brigands coming down steep places at the back of the stage, as would have become the historic pass. The identical defile where rode Timur and Jenghiz Khan, Baber the Bokharan, and Nadir Shah with the Great Mogul's Koh-i-nur in his turban and ten jeweled peacock thrones following after him—really, at the beginning, this defile lacks the wild, melodramatic scenery appropriate to its history. It was not as striking, in the landscape way, as the Nankow Pass by the Great Wall of China. At every little upgrade my pony balked until the sais got down and led him by out-stretched bridle to the top of the hill. When I demurred at myself dismounting to walk up the next trifling hill, the gentle sais whined: "Gentlemen go Khyber Pass always walk up hills." The sowar lounged in splendid ease on the back seat of his tum-tum, dawdling his Enfield on his knee, and watching us from on high as we toiled up each gentle gradient after him.
"How about that sowar? If gentlemen always walk up hills in Khyber Pass, why does n't he get down and walk?"
"Oh! Sowar no gentleman,"said the naïve one. But at the next hill a disgusted Khyberi, no gentleman that he was, dismounted and walked too.
At last Ali Majid's battlemented towers, crowning a pyramidal hill at the middle of the pass, came in range, most picturesque of many great fortresses of India, completing the wild landscape which, in turn, it commands. There the pass is narrowest, only fifteen yards from wall to wall, and a steep zigzag path leads up to the deep gateway of the old Afghan stronghold. From that aery there is a bird's-eye view down the narrow defile. The history of this Gibraltar is an unbroken record of attack, siege, defense, and slaughter—last captured, recaptured, and burned in 1897. Beyond Ali Masjid we might not go, and we could only look up the narrow rock corridor, soon closed to view by a jutting point, and imagine the Buddhist stupas and inscriptions we might not see—Samarkand four hundred and fifty miles away in air line, seven hundred and fifty by caravan road.
By noon, a far tinkling told that the camels were coming, and the caravans bound down from the fortified serai at Lundi Khana, where they had rested the night, reached Ali Masjid's gorge. The shaggy, swaying animals, with their shaggy keepers, made fitting pictures in that wild glen. Traces of vivid Bokhara waistcoats illuminated a few dingy figures, but for real, theatrical effect the troupe needed fresh costuming. Some of the caravan-men stood stock-still, rooted, transfixed, and stared at us; others feigned indifference; and others vented Pushtu curses.
Then tum-tums passed us, speeding on from Peshawar toward Kabul, and a two-horse trap, very nearly a buckboard, that was filled with prosperous Kabul merchants, ranks above common povindahs, all shapeless fur bundles topped with preposterous turbans. Gaily domed ekkas, like idols' cars, and filled with squatting figures, sped by; other ekkas, with curtains discreetly screening the traveling females, and drawn by ponies wearing blue bead necklaces, went on toward Kabul; and then came the tum-tum of a mission worker from Peshawar, who had essayed the task of reaching the Pathan heart, of subduing the wild Afridi villagers with Christian teaching. Some heroic-looking old men on spirited Kabul horses pranced by; a mounted Khyberi with pennoned lance made a picture as he cantered up; and all the while the shaggy men afoot and the strings of camels went noiselessly on, their rocking, wavering, swaying motion, the slow, deliberate, methodical lifting and placing of the soft feet, exercising a sort of hypnotic charm.
"Why do these Kabul-ly men have such white faces and blue eyes like Englishmen?" we asked our servant, who quailed when any of them glared curiously at him.
"Oh, it is very cold at Kabul, and they eat so much white grapes and fruit. That makes them white men. Kabul-ly grapes are very dear, and poor Hindu cannot buy."
Then, nearly all the long way back to Jamrud, we were meeting and overtaking strings of camels—camels to right of us and camels to left of us, camels ahead and camels behind, that thrust their unpleasant heads, with their foaming lips and yellow teeth, altogether too near. Once when the sowar fended away a too-friendly camel with his rifle-barrel, there came such screams, groans, and shrieks from the insulted beast that we felt that all the vaunted dangers of the pass were understated, and that the camels were as dangerous as the Khyberis. The diamond hitch is not known in Afghanistan evidently, for the loads were balanced rather than girded on, and cinching seems never to have been applied to the camel's waist-line. The drivers were continually rearranging loads that had tilted over or worked loose, and bending their triple-jointed legs, gaunt beasts with elongated necks sat down and protested to the echoing cañon walls while their burdens were clumsily fastened again. Kodak film was reeled away regardless of the distance from the cantonment photographer's dark-room, and still the caravans came on, bringing silk, carpets, wool, furs, fruits, and sweetmeats from Kabul; while up from Peshawar came blocks of rock-salt, chests of Indian tea, and all of Birmingham's wares, together with an unending movement of British piece-goods, into the heart of the great continent.
As we came out to wide reaches between the decreasing hills, the road was all our own again, save for the lounging sentries here and there among the rocks. Soon we emerged on the plain, the hills closed behind us, and there was spread the view that has gladdened the heart and thrilled the pulses of every marauding conqueror from the north; but for us the land of romance and mystery lay behind us, among, beyond the frontiers. The real spice, the greatest element of danger, was gone, too, when the sowar swung himself down from the tum-tum and strolled off to his barracks with a scornful smile of good-by—a smile that grimly seemed to promise a less conventional meeting.
Once beyond Jamrud walls, our Hindu bearer recovered heart and spirits, and chattered and gesticulated almost joyfully with the sais all the dusty ride back to Peshawar, as one who had faced certain death and escaped it.
There was the same scramble by the wild mob on the Khairabad platform when we again sighted the great Attock fort and bridge across the Indus. There was uproar among as many mad Pathans as ever, and it seemed as though there must always be more Afghans than room for them on the railway. The Bengali station-master, who greeted us as old acquaintances when we returned safely to his theatrical platform and its wild war drama, stood by our window and talked, and heeded this riot and the mingled roars in Pushtu no more than the ripples of the Indus on the stones below. Six-foot ruffians, with rage and hate distorting their countenances, ramped the platform and flung themselves in heaps before each third-class door, each man with enough extra cloth flapping, bagging, flying loose and trailing after him to clothe two other men in European patterns. Each bawled and beat the air like a mad-man, screaming rage and defiance at the earlier occupants of compartments where not another foot nor elbow could be insinuated by the most determined of these hairy giants. And still the Bengali talked gently on, airily admitting that the Afghans were a very bad lot. "But Abdurrahman can manage them as no one else can. They all fear him. When he dies we will have the war."
"Tell me about the Khyber Pass. How did you get permission to go there? What did you go for?" bluntly asked a German cavalry officer when we had returned to table d'hôte circles at Lahore. He cross-examined me as to every civil, social, military, and geographic fact that might have come under my observation. "You wanted to see the live Pathans because Herr Kipling has written? and to see where Alexander came through?"
We charged the uhlan with wishing to see where the next world contest will be fought, where the Russians are coming through,
"Umh-umh! Yes! I may want to see where we might want to come through ourselves."
"You! The Germans in India?"
"Certainly. Why not?"
"But will you come as the ally of the Sultan or the Czar?"
"Ally?" he repeated, in apparent amazement.