ce and gave to them a particular significance.
Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.

Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the
Fort. Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men's barracks, the stone
landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors. He looked down
into the enclosure as into a well. It might almost have been a section of
the barracks at Chatham. But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against
him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the
steep slope and the Signal Tower.

"I was here," said the Doctor, who stood behind him, "during the Malakand
campaign. You remember it, no doubt?"

"I was at Oxford. I remember it well," said Shere Ali.

"We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower
had the worst of it," continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice. "It
was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley
besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the
Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off. We had to
hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people
on the Malakand from there, while we couldn't from the Fort itself. The
Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just
hides the Pass from us. Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to
keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done. A
Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy
through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and
heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis
firing at him from short range. How it was he was not hit, I could never
understand. He did it day after day. It was the bravest and coolest thing
I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps. Prem Singh
would have got the Victoria Cross--" and the Doctor stopped suddenly
and his face flushed.

Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to
take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told,
there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the
ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give
life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and
daily repeated. Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from
the tower to the river and the high cr