A PILGRIMAGE FOR PEACE
Khan's presence acted as " open sesame " everywhere.
" Tell them, we want to travel at our risk/' he instructed
Ms son Wall Khan who was behind the steering wheel,
as we approached the first barricade. And then, " If you
hear somebody shout out ' stop', put on the brakes at
once. Nobody will touch us if they know who we are ;
but if you try to rush past, you may hear a shot ring out
after you." We halted for the night in the fruit garden of
M. Maqsudjan and his brother, who hides behind a rustic
•exterior his university education. The rush was resumed
on the following morning. Doubling the track of our ori-
ginal journey to Dera Ismail Khan we halted for a couple
of hours in the village of Ahmadi Banda, skirted the town
-of Bannu and sped past the gray masses of clay hills of the
.Salt Range on whose crumbling crests a weird loneliness
and sleep seem to brood always. Then on through the
town of Kohat and over the Kohat pass, we passed the
point, now marked by a police picket^ where a goat track
-emerges from a mountain defile and over which Mollie
.Ellis was carried by her captors to her place of captivity.
And so on over one hundred and twenty-five miles of the
track, and finally "the market square of the Peshawar
Town " at the end of the day.
Badshah Khan kept up a running fire of comment on
the various sites and localities on the route while mile
after mile of the asphalted track reeled out and was left
Tbehind. As we sped past one of the military posts with
which the Bannu-Kohat road was studded, he broke out:
" What a costly futility, Mahatmaji! Look at this vain
display of flags, armoured cars and tanks. And yet they
have not been able to capture a small band of robbers that
has been harrying this part of the country for so long.
The robber chief planted his flag on yonder hill in sight
of the military and challenged them to arrest him, but
he is still at large. Either it spells hopeless inefficiency
cm the part of the military or deliberate apathy which is
nothing short of criminal."
There were meetings with Khudai Khidmatgars both
at Paniala and Ahmadi Banda and a public meeting