Preface
After sixteen years of close contact with the Afghans and Pathans of our North-West Frontier in India, I was asked to commit some of my experiences to paper. The present book is the result. I have used the Government system of transliteration in vernacular names and expressions, and I beg the reader to bestow a few minutes’ consideration on the table of corresponding sounds and letters given on p. xvi, as it is painful to hear the way in which Englishmen, who, with their wide imperial interests, should be better informed, mispronounce common Indian words and names of places which are in constant use nowadays in England as much as abroad.
Nothing is recorded which has not been enacted in my own experience or in that of some trustworthy friend. In [Chapters XIII.] and [XIV.] it would have been unwise to give the actual names, so I have put the experience of several such cases together into one connected story, which, while concealing the identity of the actors, may also make the narrative more interesting to the reader; every fact recorded, however, happened under my own eyes. In [Chapter XXII.], the night adventure of Chikki, when he met an English officer in disguise, was related by him to me of another member of his profession, and not of himself.
I wish to thank the Church Missionary Society for allowing me to reproduce some articles which have already appeared in their publications, notably [Chapter XX.] and part of [Chapter IV.] I tender my best thanks to Major Wilkinson, I.M.S., Major Watson, H. Bolton, Esq., I.C.S., and Colonel S. Baker, for some of the photographs which have been here reproduced; and to Dr. J. Cropper for his kindness in reading the proofs.
We are at present engaged in building a branch dispensary at Thal, a place on the extreme border mentioned several times in the text, where the medical mission will have a profound influence on the trans-border tribes, as well as on those in British India. This will be known as the “Lord Roberts Hospital,” as that place was at one time of the 1879–80 campaign the headquarters of his column.
The Author’s profits on the sale of this book will be entirely devoted to the building of the hospital, and carrying on of the medical mission work at Thal.
T. L. PENNELL.