CHAPTER XVI
"GUARD YOUR SHOES"
A wide, sandy plain with trees and a little scrub. Here and there camels were feeding on this poor herbage or, where they could reach them, upon the leaves of trees.
I was on my way from Amritsar in the Bombay mail-train, and after passing Wazirabad and Lalamusa the country changed from flat plain to irregular humps and hillocks of mud, as far as eye could see. Mud everywhere—grey, desolate, monotonous mud. I passed mud towns. Here and there accumulated stores of great mud-coloured logs lay near the line river-floated from the hill forests of Kashmir. Then slabs and ridges of grey rock thrust out of the mud. I could see away over a plain of pathless distances to where a range of mountains slowly grew. Then, as in a world of crumbling fossil cities, all the grey desiccated land was dust. Presently, wild yellow grasses appeared near the dry beds of former pools and quivered a little in the faint evening breeze.
I reached Peshawar a little before dawn and got out at the cantonment and not at the city station. A powerful electric light illuminated the wide platform. It gleamed on the white sides of the carriages and caught with light the creepers on long strips of wooden trellis between the upright posts of the long station veranda. A man huddling a blanket round him was leaning back against the bookstall, and as he turned his head, his beard shone fiery red. In a drizzling rain (thrice blessed for previous shortage) mail-bags were being pitched from the train into a trolley-box. In the stationmaster's room a group of great-coated men with rifles crowded round a fire. The city station had been raided only one week before, and although the cantonment was safer "than houses" there was an invigorating air of excitement.
I drove to the Alexandra Hotel and slept for a few hours in a tent in the compound, as the rooms were all occupied by the wives of officers returning from a military expedition.
All that day Peshawar seemed a veritable slough, but the night was clear and starry and the following morning sunshine reigned. Snow glittered on the distant mountains, white cherry-blossom gleamed in orchard and garden. English children, some on ponies and some in "prams," were out with their ayahs, and the wide tree-bordered and well-kept roads through the cantonment looked not unlike English parkland in spring.
I entered the city by the Kissa Kahani—the Peshawar Lombard Street—through the pointed arch of the Edwardes Gate, the Kabuli Dariwaza. This led me to the Kotwali, with its own wide gateway leading off at right angles into the silk market and the older parts of the city. Immediately on the other side of this white-washed police station is a wide and busy space. The Kotwali faces an octagonal rest-place, called the Hastings Memorial, with seats on a platform some ten feet above the road at the other end, and between the two was a dazzling scene.
Red and white and yellow, hung out to dry in the sun after being dyed, were a myriad skeins of silk (brought hither from Bokhara and from China), on long lines up and down one side of the oval space. Opposite to these, bordering as it were the central way, were stalls of bankers and money-changers—four of them side by side and each with their large pile of rupees and other coins (which is really a mud-cone covered outside to look like a solid heap of silver). Then at the back, behind the silk on the one side and the money stalls on the other, were the lines of bazaar shops.