In some parts the mountains rose the perfection of naked desolation, appalling in their silence and sublimity, looking like the scene of some Titanic conflict in ages unknown, and yet every foot of the way there had been traced in British blood—the blood of Elphinstone's massacred army in the war of 1841.
At one point, as Robert Wodrow was proceeding along a narrow ledge above a giddy precipice, where the mists of a foaming torrent streamed upward from the deep dark chasm below, he had a narrow escape, at the thought of which his blood ran cold.
At one place, treading over a loose spot, the earth and splintered rock gave way beneath his feet, and before he could recover himself he fell upon a lower ledge, some fifteen feet beneath, where he lay for a time, half stunned and scarcely daring to breathe.
At that moment death seemed close indeed!
He was only five yards from the edge of a precipice, the height of which his mind failed to fathom, and, as one in a dreadful dream, he crawled upward and away from it on his hands and knees, till a surer and less perilous route—path it could not be called—was won, and he resumed his way with a prayer of thankfulness on his lips and in his heart—one of the prayers he had learned as a child at his mother's knee in the old manse of Kirktoun-Mailler.
His anxiety and disquietude were increased now by hearing more than once amid these profound solitudes the moaning yell of a hyæna, responded to by that other peculiar sound which seems to be something between the wail of a child and the howl of a dog—the cry of the jackal; thus, the peril of hostile men apart, he was not sorry when he came suddenly upon a species of village in a hollow of the hills—we say a species of village, as it did not consist of built houses, but only some seven or eight huts.
The dwellings, poor and mean, were formed of stakes cut from the adjacent forest, with walls formed of wicker-work plastered with mud, and called 'wattle and dab;' leaves of trees and jungle grass formed the roof, and all around them was jungle tainting the air, and to the European very suggestive of fever and miasma.
The inhabitants were rude and simple shepherds, whose doombas, or fat-tailed Persian sheep, were grazing in the neighbouring valley, and they seemed somewhat awed by the gaunt, tall, and keen-eyed warrior, who, with shield and tulwar, pistols and dagger, his floating loongee and cloak, alike stained with what was too evidently blood, suddenly appeared among them and asked for food, offering for it a handful of kusiras, or Afghan pence.
From them he got milk, chupattees, and a cuddoo, or gourd full of curry and rice, of which he ate like a famished kite, while the wondering shepherds looked on without questioning, and evidently impressed by the swagger and adopted ferocity of his bearing, believing he could be no other than 'a very devil of a budmash' (or swashbuckler) steeped in the blood of the Feringhees.
Refreshed now, he resolved to lose no time in pushing on, saying that he was going to Tezeen, which was not the case, as it lay some miles on his right, but pursued the path towards the Suffaidh Sang, and was warned at parting to beware of a certain place, marked by some ruined walls, which were the abode of the Ghoule Biaban.