Jellalabad, where the fortune of war had then cast them, the winter residence of the Cabul monarchs since the consolidation of the Dooranee Empire, is situated in an extensive valley of considerable beauty and fertility, eight-and-twenty miles long by about four broad, and the town had before this been rendered memorable by the heroic stand which Sir Robert Sale, with a handful of British soldiers, made in it against the Afghans some forty years before.
In importance it was originally only next to Cabul and Candahar, but its fortifications had been completely destroyed by General Pollock after the war that ended in 1842. Like all Afghan cities of note, it had its Balla Hissar, half palace and half citadel, with a poor population estimated at from three to ten thousand.
Many streams fertilise its valley—namely, the Cabul River, which flows near the walls; the Surkh Rud, or Red River, and the Kara Su, or Black River, while around it are numerous castles, and picturesque villages, and groups of forest trees, though an arid desert spreads in its immediate vicinity.
Nearly four months had elapsed since Leslie Colville had parted from Mary Wellwood, and already as many ages seemed to have elapsed since the few brief days of reunion they had spent together at Grosvenor Square; and now he knew that many more months must elapse, must be faced and endured, ere he could hope to turn his steps towards Europe; and even while sitting there, among these bantering and somewhat noisy fellows, he looked around him as one in a dream, whose thoughts were far away, while Mary's soft, sad features came vividly before him in memory and in their beauty, though the latter, as some old poet says,
'Is in no face, but in the lover's mind.'
'How silent you are, Colville!' exclaimed old Spatterdash, relinquishing the mouthpiece of his hookah for a moment. 'Gad, I believe the fellow's in love.'
So full were his thoughts of Mary at that precise moment that he almost coloured as if they had been read by the colonel, who continued, in a tone of banter,
'With you, I suppose, it is,
"——to bid me not to love
Is to forbid my pulse to move,
My beard to grow, my ears to prick up;
Or, when I'm in the mood, to hiccup."
Is it so? Well, anyway, stick to the brandy pawnee till tiffin comes.'