Of the Residency, the blackened walls and smouldering ashes alone remained, and as these furnished no 'loot,' the place was deserted by all save the dead.
Of the latter there lay heaped over each other, and soaked in each other's blood, some five hundred Afghans, attesting—irrespective of wounded—of the stubborn vigour of the defence, for every cartridge fired by the desperate few must have told more than double among the masses.
The marble arches and pillars of the beautiful carved arcades and open galleries, the walls and pavement, were all spotted and starred by the bullets of rifles and carbines, and clots and splashes of blood were everywhere, with the corpses of the Europeans and Guides, easily distinguished by their uniforms. The solitary survivor saw the body of the young and gallant Hamilton, stripped of his braided jacket and woefully gashed, lying across a mountain gun, over which he had fallen or been flung by his slayers, 'and beyond it, in a trench which the Afghans had failed to storm, were heaped, thick and charred by fire, the corpses of the heroic Guides. Each man had died where he stood, and in their rear were the smouldering ruins of the building wherein Cavagnari, Kelly, and others were lying.'
Robert Wodrow gave a glance at the blackened ruins of the tower on the summit of which he had last seen Colville, rifle in hand, resisting to the last, and a bitter sigh escaped him as he quitted the city, and resolutely turned his face and steps towards the passes, through which he hoped to reach our outpost at Lundi Khani Kotal, more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, amid hostile tribes and savage ways, by the Latband Pass, Jugdulluk, Gundamuck, and the Khoord Khyber, at the very contemplation of which his heart sank with despair.
'All about the city,' said a print of the time, 'there were Afghans enough—the whole hive seemed restless with multitudinous motion; but when the solitary traveller (after the hideous uproar of the past night) had cleared the city precincts, the old desolation of the dreary hill country lay stretched before him, and along the rugged ways hardly a man was moving.'
Yet the rugged paths through the stupendous passes had many dangers for the disguised hussar. Tigers, wolves, and hyenas were to be met with, making sleep and night alike perilous and horrible; and to these were added by day the chance of discovery by the equally savage tribesmen, and a death by torture, such as only the Oriental mind can conceive, at their merciless hands.
Yet, though aware of all he had to encounter, Robert Wodrow took to the hills as a mountaineer born, and strode resolutely and manfully on.
CHAPTER VI.
THE FORT OF MAHMOUD SHAH.
Resolutely had Leslie Colville defended the summit of the somewhat isolated tower on which he had taken post with only four chosen marksmen, intending to enfilade the front attack on the Residency, and pick off the best shots in possession of the lofty arsenal roof; but he had soon the mortification to see each of his men perish in quick succession, and to find the tower in flames beneath him, cutting off his descent, and leaving him helplessly exposed to a fire from those who must soon have smitten him down but for the frantic fury with which they impeded each other's aim and operations; and while thus perilously situated he heard friendly voices—or such he thought them to be—calling to him from below in Hindustani.