Читать книгу The Sirdar's Oath: A Tale of the North-West Frontier - Mitford Bertram - Страница 5

Peaks – jagged and lofty, peaks – stark and pointed, cleaning up into the unclouded but somewhat brassy blue. Rock-sides, cleft into wondrous, criss-cross seams; loose rocks again, scattering smoother slopes of shale, where the white gypsum streaks forced their way through. Beneath – far beneath – winding among these, a mere thread – the white dust of a road. Of vegetation none, save for coarse, sparse grass bents, and here and there a sorry attempt at a pistachio shrub. A great black vulture, circling on spreading wing, over this chaos of cliff and chasm, of desolation and lifelessness, turns his head from side to side and croaks; for experience tells him that its seeming lifelessness is but apparent.

“Ya, Allah! and are we to wait here until the end of the world? In truth, brother, we had better seek to serve some other chief.”

Thus one dirty-white-clad figure to another dirty-white-clad figure – both resembling each other marvellously. The same bronze visage, the same hooked nose and rapacious eyes, the same jetty tresses on each side of the face, and the same long and shaggy beard, characterised these two no less than the score and a half other precisely similar figures lying up among the interstices of this serrated ridge, watching the way beneath. The dirty-white turbans had been laid aside in favour of a conical dust-coloured kulla, the neutral hue of which headgear blended with the sad tints of the surrounding rocks and stones.

“I know not, brother,” rejoined the second hook-nosed son of the wilderness. “Yet it seems that since the Sirkar1 has been changed at Mazaran, a great change too has come over our father the Nawab.”

“Nawab!” repeated the first speaker, with disgust. “Nawab! How can our chief take such a dirty title, only fit for swine of Hindu idolators. It is an insult on the part of the accursed Feringhi to offer such a title to a freeborn son of the mountains; and such a one as the chief of the Gularzai. Nawab!” and the speaker spat from between his closed teeth, with a sort of hiss of contempt.

“Yet, if it serves to place him higher in the estimation of the Feringhi and of the tribes our neighbours, what matter?” returned the other. “The Nawab Mahomed Mushîm Khan sounds great in the ears of such.”

The sneering laugh which rattled from the other’s throat was checked, for now the attention of all became concentrated on a cloud of dust coming into view, and advancing along the thread of road winding beneath. Eagerly now, thirty pairs of fierce eyes were bent on that which moved beneath their gaze – a passing of men, mounted and armed, to the number of about three score; and fierce brows bent in hatred, as they scowled upon the representative of that irresistible Power, which, with all its failings and errors of judgment, yet in the long run held in salutary restraint the excesses of their wild and predatory race. For this was the escort of the British Political Agent, returning from an official visit to their tribal chieftain.

A squad of Levy Sowars rode in front, and a larger one of Native Cavalry, the official himself, with two or three attendants being between; the servants with camp necessaries and furniture bringing up the rear, yet taking apparent care to keep somewhat close upon the heels of the armed escort. Upon this array the wild hillmen gazed with many a muttered curse. The time for that might come, in the orderings of Allah and His Prophet; but it was not to-day – was the thought that possessed several of their minds.

The cavalcade held on its way, winding round a high precipitous spur, to reappear again further on, small and distant, then to vanish entirely where a great tangi cleft the heart of the mountain. And look! Below, once more, in the direction whence it had first appeared, whirled another cloud of dust, insignificant this time compared with before.

The eyes of the marauders gleamed from beneath shaggy brows, and a stir ran through their numbers. Brown, claw-like hands gripped the barrels of firearms – no antiquated, if picturesque jezails these, but Lee-Metford magazine rifles up to date, save for a few Martinis – while tulwars were half drawn from their scabbards, and gazed at with lovingly murderous graze ere being replaced again. Yet the group of figures which emerged into view on the road beneath was not formidable, consisting in fact of but four human beings.

Two were mounted, and two on foot, and between them they were driving several pack animals, laden to their fullest capacity. At sight of these, the band, all its tactics prearranged, moved down from its eyrie-like lurking place, dividing, as it did so, into three.

Chand Lall, general trader, who was mounted, and his two assistants who were afoot, were uneasy, and the former was secretly cursing his own avarice which had prevented him from purchasing an extra pack animal or two, which would have enabled him and his possessions to have kept beneath the wing of the Political Agent’s escort, whereas now he was very considerably behind the tail of the same. But the fourth of the group, the other mounted man, was quite cool; indeed, it looked as though he actually preferred the solitude of their wild surroundings – and perhaps he did.

“Be at peace, brother,” this one was saying. “Are we not safe, for we are in the hand of Allah? Wherefore then this hurry? Nothing can be but what is written. But there, I forget, my memory groweth old with its owner. Thou art not of the number of true believers.” And he deliberately and leisurely dismounted, as though discovering a sudden lameness in the near foreleg of his horse.

“That is all very well, Ibrahim, who art a Moslem,” said the fat Hindu, whose distressed impatience was painfully manifest. “None will harm thee. But I – ”

The words died in his throat, choked there by the sight of a number of stealing figures, flitting down from rock to rock. The countenance of the unfortunate trader grew a dirty leaden white. Already the road before him was barred. Wildly he gazed around. That behind him was barred too. His companion, quite unmoved, was still examining the hoof of his horse. High overhead, a speck in the ether, above the gnomelike crags, the black vulture still turned his head from side to side and croaked.

Already the marauders had seized the pack animals. The two young men who drove them had fallen flat and were grovelling and wailing for mercy. Rough hands had flung the Hindu from his saddle, and he lay on the ground, moaning with fear, and quaking in every limb, as he stared frantically at the dull flash of razor-edged tulwars, brandished over him, the savage, hairy faces glowering down upon him, fell and threatening with religious hate and racial contempt.

“Rise up, fat dog,” said one of the marauders, kicking him. “Rise up, and come with us.”

“Mercy, Sirdar Sahib, and suffer me to go my way,” whined the terrified man, as he tremblingly obeyed the first clause of the injunction. “I am but a poor trader, but have ever been generous to such as ye. Take therefore of my poor store, yet leave me a little that I may begin life again.”

The leader of the band laughed evilly and spat.

“Thy poor store! Ha! We will take all and afterwards skin thee of yet more, thou usurer, who comest into our country but to leave it poorer.”

“Not so, Sirdar Sahib,” expostulated the trader, plucking up a little courage by virtue of the name he was about to invoke. “What I have, I have from the Nawab – the Nawab Mushîm Khan – given in honest trade. Shall I then suffer ill-treatment at the Nawab’s very gates?”

“The Nawab. Ha – ha!” jeered the leader, spitting again. “Walk, fat infidel dog. Dost hear?”

And a buffet on the side of the head, which nearly felled him, convinced the unfortunate trader that this was no time for further expostulation; and, accordingly, panting, wheezing, stumbling, he strove his painful utmost to keep pace up the steep hill with his perilous and unwelcome escort. His attendants were undergoing but little ill-treatment. They were young and lithe, and gave no trouble; moreover, they had little or nothing to lose, so feared nothing. Ibrahim, who happened to be a mullah, and whom the other had subsidised for the supposed protection of his own company, to whom no violence whatever had been offered, was leading his steed tranquilly over the rough, stony slope, chatting and laughing familiarly with the band; and at the sight the unhappy Chand Lall’s soul grew more bitter within him. Why had he been so ready to accept this plausible rogue’s benevolent sanctity, he thought, as now fifty instances occurred to him of delays, slight at the time, but on colourable pretext, to retard him more and more – to increase subtly and imperceptibly more and more the distance between him and the armed force with which he had obtained permission to travel. Bitterly he reproached himself. He saw through it now – in fact, he did not believe that Ibrahim was a mullah at all; but mullah or not, certain it was that he was the confederate and decoy of the ferocious and predatory gang who had so daringly swooped down upon himself and his goods, almost within call of the Political Agent’s armed escort.

On they fared, higher and higher, until at length, utterly exhausted, Chand Lall realised that he lay powerless and beyond all reach or hope of aid in one of the fastnesses of his captors, away in the most savage and frowning recesses of the mountain world. And then something in the very hopelessness of it all as he saw the fruits of a long and toilsome expedition utterly thrown away, moved the wretched man to a sort of desperation. He threatened.

“See you,” he said, “I am not a man who can be smuggled away and no inquiries made. I am not a man who can be ill-treated with impunity. I am a man of consequence, and of importance to the Sirkar. I am a friend of the Nawab – ”

He stopped short. There was that in the look of the leader – to whom he had addressed these words – which seemed to freeze the half delirious desperation within him.

“A friend of the Nawab! Ha – ha! Hearken, O man of consequence and of importance to the Sirkar,” bending down a savage face to note and revel in the terror he was about to strike into his victim. “Is it possible that thou hast never yet heard the name of Murad Afzul? Is it possible, I say? Ya, Allah! is it possible?”