'Dogs!' resumed the irate hadji, encouraged by his presence and succour; 'know ye not that the time is coming when the Wahabis shall be judged according to their deserts, and each in passing a dead man's grave shall say, "Would to God that I lay there!"'

'Dog of a Soonee, when will that time come to pass?' asked one, jeeringly.

'When the sun rises in the west,' shrieked the hadji, frantic with rage; 'when the beast shall rise out of the earth near Mecca; when a smoke shall cover the earth, and the Mahdi shall come to everyone and fill the earth with righteousness.'

And much more to this effect did he vow with singular force and fluency, for the hadji was an Afghan, and, so far as regards the external forms of their religion, the Afghans are wonderfully devout, and so much of their conversation, whatever the subject, is so tinged with their religion and the Koran that one would imagine the whole people, from the Ameer to the humblest camel-driver, were engaged in holy reflections, and scarcely is a sentence uttered by them without some reference to the Deity.

One of the Wahabis now seemed to lose what little remains of sense or temper he had left, and, uttering a savage yell, swung aloft his ponderous lohbunda or staff, which was heavily shod with iron—a weapon one well-directed stroke from which would have spattered the brains of the hadji on the street—but Colville, quick as lightning, warded off the blow with his sword, in the process of which his right arm tingled to the shoulder; and as at that moment the tramp of a patrol from an inlying picquet was heard approaching, the brawlers took to flight, and Colville was left face to face with the man whose life he had saved.

'Sahib, I have to thank you gratefully for this prompt and courageous succour, but for which these dogs would no doubt have slain me,' said the pilgrim in English; 'as it is, they have handled me so roughly that I am barely able to stand.'

'You speak English very fluently,' said Colville, with genuine surprise. 'How is this?'

'My uncle was a muhafez dufter, or keeper of the records, in the office of the district magistrate, near Peshawur, who educated me to work in his office; but at his death I went back to the hills and became an Afghan soldier under Shere Ali.'

'And now——'

'I am a poor harmless hadji, Mahommed Shah, seeking but to save his soul,' said he, lowering his keen and glittering eyes, as he looked steadily around him. 'In saving me you have done a good action, and what says the fourth chapter of the Koran? "Verily, God will not wrong anyone, even the weight of an ant, and, if it be a good action, He will double it, and recompense it in His sight with a great and just reward." But these thrice accursed Wahabis,' he added, grinding his teeth with rage, and making thereby a very unpleasant sound, 'may be swallowed up by the earth as the accuser of Moses was.'