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AMANULLAH

Kabul, while the traders haggled and bartered their
goods away, and drank the profits in the wineshops,
changing the gossip of the tracks reaching down to the
Southern sea. That gossip and that relaxation had to
last them a year, and they had much to tell.

" Kabadar ! Kabadar ! " ran the chorus behind this
great cauldron of chatter.

Laughter and song from the caf<5s, the sounds of
revelry and occasional fights from the brothels. The
clink of coins from the money-changers' counters. The
tap of iron on leather, in the great market of the cobblers,
where there were stacked pyramids and hillocks of
chapplas, brightly bound in green and scarlet. Prom
the next market there came the sonorous note of the
coppersmiths' hammer, beating out the metal in, the
same-shaped vases as women carried in Kabul when
England was a savage land.

The streets were lined with the beggars and the dis-
eased. All imaginable contortions of the human body
could be seen with the stunted, rotting, decaying arms
outstretched for mercy. To look down the street was to
see a row of them, like rotten pegs sticking out of a wall.
Their shanks tucked up under them, their bodies clothed
in crawling rags, they sang the old song of the ages in
the East: " Bakshish, Bakshish, Hazar, Hazar . . ."

There were trunks of men, on tiny trolleys made from
wooden boards and wooden wheels* They were dragged
to their begging-post in the dawn, and dragged away
to sleep at night. There were yellow children, blind
and scaly with disease, moaning their demand for bread,
for alms* There were indescribable monstrosities that
drew the breath of life* Bulbous men with tremendous
heads, pink leprous women with white hair, staring eyes,
and gangrene black limbs. u Alms ! Alms ! Bakshish,
Hazar, Bakshish!"

74