EX-KING OF AFGHANISTAN

to the frontiers, and between the cities. The wireless
station crackles, to the eventual glory of Signor Pierri,
who never stayed in the wrack of internal warfare to see
his precocious child in harness, but left, with an evil
memory, for his beloved boulevards. He sees life in
Rome, while the radio crackles to his elegant memory in
the city that he hated above all others.

The gardens are tended once more, and the long vistas
of Italy engineered by the foreign gardeners for the
delight of Amanullah, now try to deny that they were
for a time submerged by rushing feet, their blooms
stifled by the smell of cordite, their elaborate order
dimmed for the eyesight by the fumes from a hundred
burning piles. In that fair valley nature heals and gives
the lie to the realities of human greed and envy. The
gardens bloom as ever they did in the false heyday of
their youth, and every evening the paths between the
orderly beds of flowers are used by the people of Kabul,
taking the best time of the day for their leisure, laughing,
playing, chattering.

On the silver screens of half a dozen cinemas there flit
the most modern images of civilisation. To escape from
the talkies, it is only necessary to go to Afghanistan,
but the silent pictures are there, and the thrilled public
watches twice nightly a succession of carefully chosen
films with a high moral purpose, showing the Afghan
warrior about his peaceful and happy occupations, the
Afghan peasant cultivating his fields in the modern and
Government-approved fashion, and the Afghan scholar
assiduously bending his head to the mysteries of educa-
tion.

All this in two years, starting from scratch. . . .

There must be something in this Nadir Shah, Western-
ised Afghan.

As vital as the positive reforms are the negative virtues

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