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