hill crests every hundred yards exchanged greeting glances with the sowar that sent more cold chills down the inert Hindu spine. There were round stone towers and square mud towers of defense as thick as sentry-boxes, and the khaki clothes and turbans, toning in with the stones and barren ground, made many of the sentries invisible until we saw a gun-barrel move or a bayonet flash. It was a radiant, perfect, sunny day, the sky one vast pale turquoise, soft and pure and gently blue, and in among the hills the air was still, and only fresh enough to make the swift ride exhilarating. Around Kadam's mud hovels there were innumerable caves in the hills, where hermits had lived in meditation in Buddhist days, and where Mohammedan saints of unwashed and doubtful sanctity now spend lives of leisure, enjoying the climate and view, subsisting on villagers' offerings, and giving themselves to much mad exhortation, animadversion of England's rule, and mouthings of Allah il allah!
There the pass really begins—a narrow ravine which runs between steep heights. Battlemented walls and far fortresses on crests suggested all the frontiers we had come to see, but it was a deserted road. There was no procession of brigands coming down steep places at the back of the stage, as would have become the historic pass. The identical defile where rode Timur and Jenghiz Khan, Baber the Bokharan, and Nadir Shah with the Great Mogul's Koh-i-nur in his turban and ten jeweled peacock thrones following after him—really, at the beginning, this defile lacks the wild, melodramatic
