Under the absolute Amir

by Frank A. Martin

The Koochee people, a sort of gipsy race who have no fixed home, but constantly travel about the country with their cattle and camels, and do a trade carrying goods and merchandise from place to place, and who are a most hardy race, live on corn bread, sheep and goat milk, cheese, and grass, eating the latter uncooked. Spinach, which grows wild, is also largely eaten by them, as well as by the other people of the country.

The food of the Afghans of the villages is principally soup and bread with curds, sour milk, butter-milk, and fruit. Butter-milk is a particular favourite with them, and an Afghan can drink a very fair quantity of it at a sitting.

If a camel, cow, or other esculent animal is sick, and it is certain that it is dying, the throat is cut, and the customary prayer said to make it halal (lawful eating), and the meat is then sold or eaten by the owners. I once saw a dying camel, that looked all skin and bone, being goaded along the bank of the river to the city that he might be killed close to the market for the better disposal of the meat, and it seemed as though the poor animal might topple over and die at any moment and cheat his master. There is little compassion in the bowels of an Afghan.

MARRIAGE PARTY OF THE “UPPER TEN.” BRIDE AND WAITING-WOMEN CARRIED IN LITTERS.

(From a drawing by the Author.)

[To face p. 88.

The better classes and well-to-do people eat of many savoury dishes, of which the principal are pilau and kabob; the latter being meat well peppered and salted, and roasted on a skewer over a fire (a roast leg of mutton is also a kabob). The pilau are of different sorts, and are composed of rice, spices, and meat; the rice and meat being stewed separately and mixed together on a dish. Preserves, pickles, sweetmeats, fruit, bread, are also eaten, and the ever present tea is taken to wind the meal up with, and with the tea the chillum is handed round, that tobacco may put the crowning touch on all. Large quantities of tea are consumed daily by the Kabulis, who drink it as often as they can afford it.

Women smoke the chillum as well as men. It is shaped like the hookah, but has a straight stem instead of a flexible one. The tobacco is of country growth, and is very rank smelling, more resembling a burning oil rag than anything else.

The Afghans call any large, fat man a strong one, and as fatness is considered a sign of both health and prosperity, all people who can afford to do so, eat until gorged, and in consequence many of them, both men and women, are grossly fat. The late Amir’s chief physician was so fat he could not walk, and had to be carried. Another man was so fat that he could do nothing for himself, and had to be washed and dressed by his slave girls, much as a baby is. Of this man I was told that he once noticed a very objectionable smell about his body, and in spite of all that was done to better it, the smell at last got so bad that he told the slave girls to carry him to the hamam and bath him, and while washing him, as ordered, the girls discovered the cause of the nuisance to be a dead frog hidden in one of the folds of fat. It had no doubt got in when the man was having his last tub, and been crushed to death.