EX-KING OF AFGHANISTAN

at first delighted the frenzied Kabulis by the ingenuity
of the punishments inflicted on all who had done them
wrong in the past. His black heart revelled in a display
of inhuman delight in suffering. At the time, nothing
could have better pleased his people.

When, however, it began to be realised that his greed
for the sight of human suffering could not be satisfied,
the Kabulis regretted their first admiration. His im-
prisonment of the women and children connected with
the former Court was no doubt justified in their eyes, but
they began to learn that his was a veritable love of
cruelty not to be limited to those deserving punishment.

He had ruled ferociously, and ferociously did he die.
When they came to him, chained and beaten in the
prison of the Palace, he guessed his end. Nobody can
tell the order of his sufferings, and how long he lived, but
it is certain that before the mangled remnants of his body
were swept down by the swift Kabul River, he had been
beaten, crucified, stoned, shot, and hanged and quartered.

The picture of him on the crucifix, still living, was later
hawked round the Peshawar bazaar, and the inquisitive
were charged eight annas a look. He was still living
when, after being cut down from his exposure in the
public streets of Kabul, he was once more beaten and
eventually shot like a thief.

Kabul was remembering those months of tyranny,
when the sight of men hanging in the street was not un-
common. Bacha Sachao, once the romantic Robin Hood
of the hills, died dishonoured and unmourned, though
the tales told in the Peshawar whispering-gallery men-
tioned that he never flinched, never pleaded with his
torturers, and at the end had a bawdy joke and a taunt
o& his writhing lips.

But Nadir Khan, praising Allah and rejoicing in the
blessing that he had been able to bring to Kabul, was

K, 257