Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/282

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260
WINTER INDIA

baned and bearded to exaggeration, ramped up and down the platform with bare feet thrust in loose, clattering Mohammedan shoes, shouldering and hustling one another in no gentle way. Despite the clamor and the crowding, as so many desperate tribesmen stormed and carried each third-class carriage and filled every cubic inch of its space with their own superfluous size and belongings, the train finally drew away, leaving the platform full of leftover passengers—"huge, black-haired, scowling sons of Ben-i-Israel," who raged aloud in their wrath, until one felt sure the station-master must barricade himself and the great guns of Attock thunder across the river before the uproar would subside. These tall, hairy, and noisy creatures, with peaked Afghan caps within their striped turban-cloths, were far removed from the soft and supple Hindus we had left in the South, unlike even the bearded Sikhs at Lahore. We had journeyed overnight to another country, had come again to a blue-eyed people, to the pale Aryans of the Northwest, to a race of weather-beaten and ruddy-cheeked mountaineers, to the Pathans of Kipling's tales—tales so true, pictures so clearly painted, that one recognizes these hairy giants as fascinating old acquaintances, characters in fiction come to life.

Crossing more of the same dreary, yellow plain, and nearing the mountain barrier, the train at last ran by the mud walls of a mud city in a mud plain,—Peshawar, Akbar's "frontier city," the extreme northern outpost of the Indian Empire; nineteen hundred miles from Cape Comorin and two hun-