“May you never grow weary,” said the Guide in the polite formula of the road.

“May your riches ever increase,” came the stock reply.

“And how about that man on the charpoy?” bawled Abdul Mujid.

“Oh, he’s all right, having by the mercy of God a thick skull,” came the reply.

“Shahbash! come and feast with me when your business is finished.  I will make preparations at the cook-shop at the head of the bazaar.”

And so ended in peace and jollification an adventure which at one time looked much more like cold-blooded murder and a string of vendettas.

CHAPTER XII

THE RELIEF OF CHITRAL

The anxiety of great events in South Africa has somewhat dimmed the recollection of our smaller troubles in previous years; but perhaps there are some who can recall the feeling of tense suspense that enthralled the nation during the spring of 1895.

Two hundred miles from our borders in an inaccessible, and hitherto almost unheard of, valley lay besieged a little force of Indian soldiers, under the command of a sprinkling of British officers.  Between the beleaguered garrison and the nearest support lay great chains of the highest mountains in the world, still covered thick in snow, rivers deep and strong and of incredible treachery, roads that were mere goat-tracks carried along the face of precipices, or following a shingly bed between stupendous walls of rock, many made doubly perilous by craftily prepared stone-shoots.  To add to the difficulties of the task climatic variations of extraordinary diversity had to be overcome, for troops might one day be freezing on a pass twenty thousand feet above the sea, and on another sweltering under the tropical heat of the valley below; days passed under the scorching rays of an Eastern sun might be succeeded by nights without shelter under storms of cold and pitiless rain.  Finally one of the two relief columns had to pass through two hundred miles of unmapped and unexplored country, inhabited by armed fanatical tribes fiercely opposed to the passage of the troops while the other, weak in numbers, and marching en l’air hundreds of miles from any support, was a veritable forlorn hope.

It speaks highly for the mobilisation arrangements of the Indian Army that within eleven days a corps of all arms, twenty-five thousand strong, had derailed at a little roadside station, and under Sir Robert Low had marched forty-two miles to the frontier, fought a decisive action, and forced the first barrier of mountains on its road to Chitral.  Unhappily it does not lie within the region of this story to relate how the gallant forlorn hope under Colonel Kelly, overcoming stupendous difficulties, made its way to the succour of the sore beset garrison, but history has already done justice to that gallant achievement.  Here, in a regimental narrative we are naturally restricted to the column to which the Guides belonged.