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EX-KING OF AFGHANISTAN

Everyone was secretive. Nobody dare show that he
was too prosperous. Methods of money extortion for
the Government were growing more violent, and it was
already remarkable how rich men disappeared, or how
their houses and their shops would be ransacked in a
night without a trace of the identity of the looters.
Kabul, volcano of the East, was being stirred up for
some new eruption.

The money-brokers, always willing to exchange the
gossip of the city as they changed rupees, roubles,
dollars, or English silver over their long counters, were
strangely careful these days. They trusted nobody.
They looked down, inscrutable, from behind their high
counters, six feet above the milling crowds. Before
them were their little piles of gleaming money, ready
for the stranger who might have travelled from the four
points of the compass to the great grain market of the
East.

And of a truth, this bazaar might well be the great
mart of gossip as well as the centre of cosmopolitan
Eastern finance and trade. Here were sallow Mon-
golian faces, with long melancholy moustaches ; here
were slant eyes from China, and proud pale blue eyes
from Southern Afghanistan; here were wide, cheerful
faces from Japan; heavy features and great limbs from
Russia; men of the steppes and men of the plains;
Indian traders with the faces of Moses ; cunning little
rats of babus, despised and fearful, but reputed to be
very rich. A strange boiling-pot of the nations of the
East, harbouring the outcasts and the robbers of half a
iozen Eastern nationalities. Every man carried arms,
From the long rifle across the Afridi's broad shoulders
bo the knife hidden in the sleeve of the Chink.

As great a divergence was there too, in the garb of
;hese families of the East. The Kabuli himself wore

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