The Lotus and the Wind Read Online Free PDF

at him, both of you, before having him buried. Yes, I’ve searched him. Nothing.’
    The officer and the Pathan stooped under the hood of the bullock cart. The officer stood up almost at once and exclaimed, ‘When did he get this? Look, there’s a stab mark through the bandages on his chest.’
    Hayling started forward. ‘My God, there is!’ He stepped back, and the two men stared at each other. Hayling said, ‘Pabbi. There was a scuffle there. Someone must have done it then.’
    ‘Yes, sir. Why?’
    ‘Been paid to, obviously. We could find out who, but not why. They wouldn’t have been told. We’ll have to do our best to get something out of them, though.’
    ‘Sir, may it not have been done to prevent him talking? The people in Pabbi might have thought he was still alive--and whoever it was that hired them to do the job.’
    ‘Yes, that would be their latest information, perhaps. Look here, Gluck, get Ashraf Khan to put the body on ice in our office somewhere. I don’t want to talk here, but we may recognize him if we ask the right people.’ His voice dropped so that Anne could not hear any more. After a minute the cart rolled away, with the young officer and the stately Pathan walking together behind it.
    Anne cried, ‘Major Hayling! Who is he? Please tell me! I do want to know. I tried to help him.’
    The major had remounted his horse. He said, ‘You deserve to know, Miss Hildreth, and I’ll tell you when I can. Goodbye for the moment, ma’am. Good-bye, Hildreth. Good-bye, Miss Hildreth; it’s been a pleasant trip for me--except for this--because of your company. May I hope I shall be allowed to see more of you when you are safely ensconced in this peaceful and happy cantonment?’ He smiled suddenly and added, ‘But I really would like to!’ waved his hook, and was gone.
    The commissariat guides came, full of apologies, and the carriage moved. A wide, unpaved road led westward past scattered shops towards the military cantonment. Anne sat next to her father, facing backwards, and huddled closer into her wrap. A bitter wind from the Khyber Pass chilled her neck and made the lamps flicker in the open shop fronts. The sun had set; the twilight fell greyer and darker every minute on the walls and the road and the leaves of the trees. Down-country the light had seemed almost blue to her eyes at this time of day. Here the iron of the mountains hardened it and took away its life. She looked over her right shoulder and saw a dim, flat plain, and beyond that, high up, the snowy cliffs of the Tirah, where the sun lingered.
    Frontiersmen strode by with long, lifting steps. The trotting carriage horses drew the Hildreths slowly past a column of marching Highlanders. The young soldiers marched on the shoulder of the road, their tall khaki topis nodding in time to the slow swing of their kilts. They trod heavily, seeming to keep close to the ground; they joked in the ranks, yet moved with much majesty. Their individual bodies and the sense of their collective movement were slow and stolid against the litheness of the Pathans.
    A young tribesman passed; he walked as though dancing in the road, and sang to himself, and had oiled, bobbed hair with a red flower in it. Camels sailed through the dust, riding in like ships to port from distant seas. It was Robin who had quoted that bit to her--’a port belongs as much to the sea as to the land.’ So it was. Peshawar belonged to India and also to the mountains and the steppes and the sand deserts beyond the Khyber.
    The camel bells tinkled, growing fainter, down the road. They must have come from Afghanistan--right through the war zone, perhaps; from Russia even, across the Oxus and over the snowy Hindu Kush. Sighing, she snuggled up against her father. She saw that her mother had gone to sleep. Her father put a pudgy hand on her shoulder, and she was comforted. He was fat and old and hardly ever understood what she meant--but he understood now. This breath of Central