The Dark Defile Read Online Free PDF

the Kaffir tribe from the mountains north of Kabul, reputedly descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Though the boy was pale and had bluish eyes, Burnes was unconvinced he had Macedonian ancestry.
    Departing Kabul in mid-May, Burnes carried away with him an impression of Dost Mohammed as “the most rising man in Kabul”—an able man and a strong leader, far superior to Shah Shuja. He was convinced that “unless it be propped up by foreign aid,” the old Sadozai regime with its exiled figurehead Shah Shuja languishing at British expense in Ludhiana had passed away “in favour of the more vigorous Barakzais whose supremacy seemed acceptable to the people.” Events would prove him absolutely correct. However, his view of the Afghans in general was misjudged. He thought them “a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs … their ruling vice is envy … No people are more incapable of managing intrigue.”
    As Burnes and his companions trudged north through hilly country, where the snows still lay five feet deep, toward the Hindu Kush, Burnes suffered agonies of snowblindness—the burning of the cornea—from the glaring reflection of the sun on the white landscape. However, reaching the valley of Bamiyan with its two Buddhist statues, a male figure 120 feet high and a female one 70 feet tall carved into the mountainside, he was sufficiently recovered to sketch them. 9 Soon they had passed from Afghan territory into lands controlled by slave-taking Uzbek tribes, fanatical in their observance of Sunni Islam. Burnes and his party had to be very careful not to cause offense. After being warned that they should never sleep with their feet toward Mecca, “which would be evincing [their] contempt for that holy place,” Burnes took the precaution of consulting his compass indoors as well as out. He also trimmed the central part of his mustache to avoid being taken for a Shia Muslim.
    By early June they were out of the towering defiles of the mountains and entering the plains sloping northward to the Oxus River. Ahead lay the lands of Murad Beg, ferocious Uzbek ruler of Kunduz, of which it was said, “If you wish to die, go to Kunduz.” Burnes hoped to move swiftly onward without attracting attention. He and his party never changed their clothes, ignoring the lice, used their sleeves as towels and their nails as combs, ate hard bread and slept on dung-covered floors, but Burnes thought these just petty inconveniences “when compared with the pleasure of seeing new men and countries, strange manners and customs, and being able to temper the prejudices of one’s country, by observing those of other nations.” One of those customs, though, was the sale of sad, dejected slaves in the bazaars. Mohan Lal watched a prospective purchaser take a girl behind a wall to examine her body: “when her veil was lifted up by the seller and gradually her cap and sheet, the woman, turning her face towards the sky, began to rend the air by her screams.”
    However, through the officiousness of the Afghan that Nawab Jubbar Khan had sent with the party, Murad Beg learned of their presence and summoned Burnes to Kunduz, seventy miles away. Leaving Dr. Gerard and Mohan Lal behind, Burnes set out, uncomfortably aware that some years earlier another expedition led by an East India Company veterinary surgeon called William Moorcroft, the first Englishman to reach Bokhara, had been imprisoned by Murad Beg. Reaching Kunduz, Burnes put on a pair of high felt boots to conceal his “provokingly white ankles” and with some trepidation waited on the Uzbek chief, an ugly man “with harsh Tartar features.” However, Murad Beg believed Burnes’s story that he was just a poor Armenian traveler, and he returned with relief to his companions.
    They traveled onward to