one and clad in tattered clothing, smaller than the starting- big, bearded, long-haired, dirty, point, and not unlike a Border peel, as indeed it is. The driver blows his bugle; a man leads the next relay of horses out from the rough shed at the foot of the tower and waits. The tonga pulls to a trot and draws up. They proceed to unyoke the horses. The foamThe foamflecked dripping pair are led away and walked up and down the road to cool off, and the fresh horses are backed in as the driver holds up the pole with its curricle - bar. The escort, like good horsemen, have dismounted. The two who follow the tonga have now white moustaches and eyelashes. One has wound the long tail of his turban across his mouth and nostrils to keep out the dust. Their dark eyes show bright and clear from their dust-seamed faces. The garrison of the post, such as are not on picket duty, look out and pass the time of day. Again the tonga, with its escort, starts, and as the post is left behind the monotony of the galloping hoofs and clattering, grinding wheels again shuts down. Past a Mussulman graveyard, with its tombs all due north and south: round a bend, and a string of camels comes into view. The tonga pulls up to a trot, and the man with the leading camel runs across and pulls it into the side of the road. The road is none too broad. They have been down to British India, trading. The men with the camels gaze at the tonga with keen eyes and impassive faces. They are The heat is increasing, and the glare from the road grows greater. Yet it is nothing to what the afternoon will bring. The driver's eyes are narrowed to slits. A mud village surrounded by a high wall and topped by fortified towers is passed. Round the bend comes a trooper of the Frontier militia, a replica of the men of the escort. He is followed soon after by two Englishmen with two other troopers. Another trooper brings up the rear. The Englishmen are burnt brick-red and look hot, tired, and dusty. They wear khaki shirts and back-pads, and each carries a pistol. They are one of the officers of the Frontier militia and the doctor. The latter has multifarious duties. He is in charge of both the civil and military hospitals. The prison is in his care, and he superintends the chickenincubator in the headquarters mess. He will treat any that come to him, and has a fine knowledge of gunshot wounds and sword cuts. He is ac tonga. One more stage now and the driver's work is done till he takes the returning tonga on the morrow. This is the post where all from independent country entering British territory by this pass must leave their arms, obtaining a receipt and redrawing their weapons on presenting it again when they return across the frontier. Here is also a detachment of the Border Military Police who patrol the actual frontier. customed to do major operations last. Here the escort leave the under conditions that would make a house-surgeon's blood run cold, and has the implicit trust of the tribesmen who know him. He is in the pennyworth, as he looks after the men who mind the road. The valley opens out into another circular plain-not quite so sterile this time. A few scattered villages wring a scanty living from the poor soil by means of irrigation. In the centre stands their immediate market, the headquarters post, quite the biggest that has yet been passed. Here six hundred men are in garrison, and the political officer has his headquarters. He is lord of the high, low, and middle justice on the road, as witnesseth the gallows standing outside. Here a longer halt is made; letters are handed in and mailbags received. The driver has his morning meal. Before drinking water he piously ejaculates: "In the name of God." On again in an hour's time, down the long winding road. The valley again closes in; more relays and fresh escorts, other pickets, all give their share of work, for the penny. The heat is now that of a furnace, and is reverberated from the stony hills on either hand. The valley narrows still more-bare, rocky, sterile, and with banks of high scarped clay. Down across the stream, here a bit broader, and up the other side and ahead appears the post of "Three Mounds." The mail is in British India at The tonga goes on again, and ahead a fertile oasis in this desolate land comes to view. Fields of waving crops flank the road. Irrigation channels chatter and gurgle pleasantly. The road is lined with mulberry-trees. More people are seen. Villages abound. Camels, ekkas or pony-carts, bullockcarts, pack - mules, pack-bullocks, potters taking their wares to market on scissorhocked donkeys with slit nostrils,-all the life of the highway in the Indian Empire. A double company of regular Native infantry wheels on to the road from the rifle-range, and marks time to let the king's mail pass. They are great bearded Sikhs, each wearing his steel bangle on his wrist. It is drawing toward evening as the tonga gets to the station. It is not a big one, and is eighty miles from the railway, but it is civilisation after the wild country through which the mail has come. To the militia officer on the road it is town. There are here three regiments and a battery, all of the Native army. Round the corner to the left the tonga goes, passing the polo-ground, where the British officers are at the game beneath the walls of the old mud fort, built by the Sikhs who now help to hold it for the Empire, whose insignia floats from the flagstaff. Round the corner to the left again, past a Mohammedan shrine gay with coloured rags fluttering from the trees, and the mail-tonga comes to rest at the post-office, a plain brick building in its trim green garden. The The mail-bags are re-sorted, and at 8.30 another similar tonga stands outside. bags are handed over and stowed, and the lamp lit, for it is the hot weather and the tonga must travel by night. The driver takes his seat and skirts the garden of the Frontier Force mess. The officers are at dinner outside. He drives down past the flat-roofed bungalows of sun-dried mud, whose white washed raingutters show up glimmering through the dark. The tonga turns into a garden. It is going to take up a passenger, else such good value for one penny were not to be had. A British officer, in breeches of the ubiquitous khaki and a rough shooting-coat, stands in the verandah. His orderly, a Sikh, is with him. The orderly stows a gun-case under the seat. The driver, with the help of the ostler, ropes the luggage on to the splash-board. The passenger picks up his foxterrier by the scruff of the neck and throws him on to the seat. The orderly sits in front, the officer behind, and again a start is made. The tonga goes along the road bordering the glacis of the fort and halts opposite the gate. A burly figure is waiting by the roadside with a bundle of bedding and a box. It is a Pathan native officer from one of the regiments in the fort. He and the Englishman greet each other, for although of different regiments they are of the Frontier Force and know each other well. They both sit behind and talk. They address each other as "Your honour," as is the custom. The British officer passes his cheroot-case. Presently they drop the Urdu "lingua-franca" of India and proceed in the native officer's mother-tongue. They "thee and thou" each other. "Yes," the Englishman is going shooting, a good markhar head being still wanting in his collection. The Pathan is going to settle some dispute about land and irrigation rights. He says: "We are not bemused by pleaders and lawyers in my country," and tersely adds that a rifle-shot can often hasten a decision. They discuss politics. They are not the politics of Westminster. The Pathan has a shadowy glimmering idea of a great "jirga" somewhere in England, and the Englishman regards party politics as 8 dirty business. Their politics. are of the Frontier. What tribes are in a state of unrest, and why; who are the firebrands; the latest exploit of the "Lifter" and other outlaws; whether such and such a Malek is a man of his word; and kindred topics. Two troopers pass with their rifles across their saddle-bows. They are Border Military Police on patrol. The king's mail was stopped and two Hindu traders kidnapped and held up to ransom not so long ago. On and on the irrigated country has been left behind long ago, and nothing but desert borders the side of the road. Now and again a sparse cluster of tamarisk-tree whirls behind black against the stars. The passengers relapse into silence. The moon rises: stages are arrived at and left: ponies refuse to start, and have to be persuaded by a bight of rope slipped round a fetlock and hauled on from in front. The tonga is into the hills again. Gustave Doré's illustrations of Dante's Inferno' would convey the best impression of the country. Outcrops of salt show ghostly through the gloom, and all the streams have a border of coarse salt. Where they run across the road the wheels first crackle on the salt, then splash, then crackle again. The passengers get sleepy and doze. Only the men who are working for a share of the penny keep wide awake. At the stages the driver sometimes feels the tyres, gives a grunt, and fetches water which he pours over the fellies and the hubs. Once or twice He he has a few pulls at the stagekeeper's pipe before starting. A thunderstorm mutters and grumbles away to the northwest, and the driver wonders if "White-stone " nullah will be in flood. He has seen it up to the ponies' saddles after a storm in the hills. He plies his whip to get the right side of it as soon as possible. stoops down and gets a mailbag, which he gives to the orderly and tells him to put it behind the sahibs' shoulders as a cushion. Consideration is due to them: they always give the driver a rupee, else the share of the postal pennies were too scanty for a wife and three children. At length dawn comes. The tonga is only two stages from the rail now. It rounds amongst the low hills, and on the plain appear the fort, city, cantonments, and railway station. This pair of ponies are jaded and only trot. corner Through the gates of the level-crossing, by the station, past the parade-ground, where all the garrison are busy; round to the right to the Kutcherri or Government offices the tonga goes, and draws up in a courtyard between the post-office and the rest-house. The driver takes the mail-bags in, reclaiming the pillow-bag with a smile. The ostler unropes the luggage, and, assisted by the orderly, carries it to the rest-house. The passengers alight. The Britisher stretches himself, yawns, dives a hand in his pocket, gives something to the driver, ignores his wish that he may speedily become the commander-in-chief, strides to the rest-house followed by a shivering fox-terrier, and disappears shouting for tea and a bath. The driver gazes at his hand for a moment, puts two whole rupees in his pocket, and proceeds to drive the native officer to the city and take his horses and himself to the tonga stables. The mail-bags, now augmented, next appear at the station in the forenoon. A varied crowd fills the hall behind the barrier. A goodly sprinkling of Sikhs, Pathans, and Punjabi Mussulmans, each wearing one or more medals on a bit of black ribbon round his neck, is to be seen. They are sepoys going on leave and furlough. The train comes in. The sweet and food sellers ply their trades with shrill cries. Screams, curses, oaths fill the air. A harassed Eurasian guard tries to hurry things up. The mailbags are given into his charge. The train starts, to the great danger of friends and relations, who will not stand back. disappears down the line, and the platform is cleared by three policemen in red and blue turbans, blue shirts and khaki trousers. Along the valley goes the train, every peak and col in view being historic in the annals of the frontier: past a spit of protruding Afridi country; past stations like small forts, with bullet-proof shutters and loopholed, to rumble at last slowly over the bridge across the Indus. There are two hundred feet of water under this bridge, and the hot It weather temperature is like unto Tophet here. A penny purchases a share of all the grim hard work and anxiety that went to the building. The scrambling over the rocks of the gorge during the survey; the planning, the calculation, the draughting in the sleepy hot office under the punkah when the draughtsman's arm wets the paper with perspiration; the making of the girders in far-off England and their transport by sea and land: a man could not sleep at night for the fear lest the bridge he was building from either end would not meet dead true in the centre. Men died and were damaged in the building. They were all working for a penny. Nay! the penny may even fulfil a prophecy, "Whoso bridges the Indus shall hold the rule of the Punjab for ever." So runs the old saying. On goes the train over stony plains, dancing in mirage until the land gets less sterile and Rawal Pindi is reached. Here the Walaiti-dak waits for the Peshawar-Bombay mail,—that wonderful train with its run of near 1600 miles. Then on and on it goes: down the line, past the mound said to cover the bones of Alexander's horse Bucephalus, zig-zagging carefully down hillsides and stretching into full pace across the levels, across the mighty rivers of the Punjab, swirling down swollen with the melting snows of the Himalayas, every culvert and every bridge that bears it guarded by its blockhouse, until at last Lahore is reached. |