who takes, even in sport, the believer for an unbeliever, is himself an unbeliever."* Give me rather something for my fatiha, that I may proceed farther on my journey." My serious look, and the hadis which I recited, quite disconcerted the young man; he sat down half ashamed, and, excusing himself on the ground of the resemblance of my features, said that he had never seen a hadji from Bokhara with such a physiognomy. I replied that I was not a Bokhariot, but a Stambuli; and when I showed him my Turkish passport, and spoke to him of his cousin, the son of Akbar Khan, Djelal-ed-din Khan, who was in Mecca and Constantinople in 1860, and had met with a distinguished reception from the sultan, his manner quite changed; my passport went the round of the company, and met with approbation. The prince gave me some krans, and dismissed me with the order that I should often visit him during my stay, which I accordingly did.

However fortunate the issue of this amusing proceeding, it had still some consequences not very agreeable, as far as my continued stay in Herat was concerned. Following the prince's example, every one wanted to detect in me the Englishman. Persians, Afghans, and Herati came to me with the express purpose of convincing themselves and verifying their suspicions. The most boring fellow was a certain Hadji Sheikh Mehemmed, an old man rejoicing in the reputation of being a great astrologer and astronomer, and really, as far as opportunity enabled me to judge, one well read in Arabic and Persian. He in*Traditional sentence of the Prophet.

CHAP. XIV.

CAPTURE OF HERAT.

325

formed me that he had traveled with Mons. de Khanikoff, and had been of much service to him in Herat, and that the latter had given him a letter to the Russian embassador in Teheran, of which he wished me to take charge. In vain did I try to persuade the good old man that I had nothing to do with the Russians; he left me with his convictions unshaken. But what was most droll was the conduct of the Afghans and Persians; they thought they saw in me a man à la Eldred Pottinger, who made his first entry into Herat disguised as a horse-dealer, and became later its master. They insisted that I had a credit here for hundreds, even thousands of ducats, and yet no one would give me a few krans to purchase bread!

Ah! how long the time seemed that I had to pass in Herat waiting for the caravan! The city had a most gloomy, troubled aspect; the dread of their savage conqueror was painted on the features of its inhabitants. The incidents of the last siege, its capture and plundering, formed the constant subjects of conversation. According to the assertions of the Herati (which are, however, not founded in fact), Dost Mohammed Khan took the fortress, not by the bravery of the Kabuli, but by the treason of the garrison; they insist, too, that the beloved prince Sultan Ahmed was poisoned, and that his son Shanauvaz, who is almost deified by the Herati, did not obtain information of the treachery before a great part of the paltan (soldiers) had already forced their way into the fortress. The struggle carried on by the besieged prince with his angry father-in-law was of the bitterest description, the sufferings borne and inflicted were

he returns the same answer when accusations are laid before him of murder or theft; the plaintiff, surprised, repeats his story, but obtains the eternal answer, "Her tchi pish bud," and so he must retire.

A striking proof of the confusion that pervades every thing is the circumstance that, in spite of unheard-of duties, in spite of endless imposts, the young serdar can not raise out of the revenues of the province of Herat a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of the civil functionaries and the garrison of fourteen hundred men. Mr. Eastwick reports, according to a statement made by the prince governor of the province of Khorasan, that the income of Herat amounts yearly to 80,000 toman (£38,000), but from this sum are to be maintained, besides the corps of civilians, five regiments of infantry, and about 4000 cavalry, for which purpose the amount given is clearly insufficient. With a larger income, Herat of the present day has far fewer expenses; the terrified city is easily governed; and it can only be ascribed to maladministration that a subvention is required from Kabul to defray the expenses of the troops. Had Dost Mohammed only lived a year longer to consolidate the government of the newly-conquered province, the incorporation of Herat with Afghanistan might have been possible. As it is, fear alone keeps things together. It needs only some attack, no matter by whom, to be made upon Herat, for the Herati to be the first to take up arms against the Afghans. Nor does this observation apply to the Shiite inhabitants

*"Journal of a Diplomate's Three Years' Residence in Persia," vol. ii., p. 244.

CHAP. XIV.

EXCURSION TO GAZERGHIAH.

329

alone, whose sympathies are, of course, in favor of Persia, but even to those of the Sunnite persuasion, who would certainly prefer the Kizilbash to their present oppressors; but I find no exaggeration in the opinion that they long most for the intervention of the English, whose feelings of humanity and justice have led the inhabitants to forget the great dif ferences in religion and nationality. The Herati saw, during the government of Major Todd, more earnestness and self-sacrifice with respect to the ransoming of the slaves* than they had ever even heard of before on the part of a ruler. Their native governments had habituated them to be plundered and murdered, not spared or rewarded.

Two days before my departure I suffered an Afghan to persuade me to make an excursion to a village in the vicinity named Gazerghiah, to pay a visit there to the tombs of Khodja Abdullah Ansari and of Dost Mohammed Khan, in order, as it is said, to kill two flies with one blow. On the way I paid my parting visit to the fine ruins of Mosalla. The remains of the mosque and of the sepulchre, which the great Sultan Husein Mirza caused to be built for himself ten years before his death (901), are, as I before mentioned, an imitation of the monuments of Samarcand. Time would have long spared these

*The report is general in Herat that Stoddart was sent on a mission to Bokhara to ransom the Herati there pining in captivity.

The sepulchre particularly has much resemblance to that of Timour. The decorations and inscriptions upon the tomb are of the most masterly sculpture it is possible to conceive. Many stones have three inscriptions carved out, one above the other,

CHAPTER XV.

FROM HERAT TO LONDON.

AUTHOR JOINS A CARAVAN FOR MESHED.-KUHSUN, LAST AFGHAN TOWN.FALSE ALARM FROM WILD ASSES.-DEBATABLE GROUND BETWEEN AFGHAN AND PERSIAN TERRITORY.- BIFURCATION OF ROUTE.-YUSUF KHAN HEZAREH.-FERIMON.-COLONEL DOLMAGE.-PRINCE SULTAN MURAD MIRZA.— AUTHOR AVOWS WHO HE IS TO THE SERDAR OF HERAT.-SHAHRUD.—TEHERAN, AND WELCOME THERE BY THE TURKISH CHARGÉ D'AFFAIRES, IS

MAEL EFFENDI. — KIND RECEPTION BY MR. ALISON AND THE ENGLISH EMBASSY.-INTERVIEW WITH THE SHAH.-THE KAVVAN UD DOWLET AND THE DEFEAT AT MERV. RETURN BY TREBIZONDE AND CONSTANTINOPLE TO PESTH.-AUTHOR LEAVES THE KHIVA MOLLAH BEHIND HIM AT PESTH AND PROCEEDS TO LONDON.-HIS WELCOME IN THE LAST-NAMED CITY.

"Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark

Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw nigh home.”—Byron.

On the 15th of November, 1863, I quitted Herat, the gate of Central Asia or of India, as it is usually called, in order to complete my journey with the great caravan bound for Meshed. It consisted of 2000 persons, half of whom were Hezare from Kabul, who, in the greatest poverty and the most abject state of misery, were undertaking, with wives and children, a pilgrimage to the tombs of Shiite saints. Although all formed one body, it had, nevertheless, many subdivisions. I was attached to a division consisting of a troop of Afghans from Kandahar, who were trading with Persia in indigo or skins from Kabul, owing to my having made my agreement with the same