"A hundred of our miles!" thought Waller, and his spirit sank.
"Undisguised, you can never escape my husband's people, or hope to reach it safely; but I shall provide for all that."
"You will not deceive me?" said Waller anxiously, as he feared some snared
"No, I swear it; be of good courage and you shall soon be safe."
The following day, when most of the shepherds had gone to prayer at a musjid among the mountains, leaving the women and female children behind, as the sexes never pray together in the mosques, she conducted Waller into the inner portion of their tent—her own apartment—where discovery would have ensured him instant death. With scissors she clipped off closely his long fair beard and mustaches; she stained his face, ears, and neck with walnut juice and wood ashes; his hair she disguised by smearing it with more ashes and ghee—a process under which Waller, usually so dainty in his toilet, rather winced. She took away and buried his poshteen and tattered uniform, and made him, in its place, put on the red dress of a Hindoo Fakir. She slung a brass drinking lotah to his girdle of cord, gave him some chupatties and other food, and, placing a staff in his hand, showed him the route to pursue, a narrow path among the mountains, by which he could avoid a rencontre with the returning shepherds, and strike on the direct road for Jellalabad.
Waller's heart was filled with genuine gratitude; but he had only his earnest thanks to bestow on this good woman, who hastened his departure; and in less than two hours after she had thus transformed him, he had left the black tents of the shepherds several miles behind him.
In no other disguise than this could he have been so safe from discovery. In the character of a Fakir he might beg with impunity, revile and anathematise with a vociferation that inspired terror, or he might remain obstinately silent, according to the pretended humour or real emergency of the moment. Thus, as none might dare to question his motives, his supposed sacred calling rendered him safe alike from interruption, inquiry, or suspicion, and he went on his way rejoicing.
He had many strange and quaint adventures, but encountered no more perils by the way he had to pursue on foot. His great stature and sturdy figure won him the special favour of the women, particularly of those with whom he conversed at the wayside wells; and in many instances he discovered that pleasant little perquisites must often fall to the share of Fakirs and Dervishes; for ladies contended for the honour of feeding him, and pressed upon him tillas, and even mohurs of gold, to have refused which would have been totally untrue to his clerical character. Once he had a narrow escape from encountering Osman Abdallah the Arab Hadji, the same fanatic whom he had run through the body on the day the Envoy was assassinated, and whom he saw asleep, too probably intoxicated with bhang, on a piece of mat, at the door of a village khan. On another occasion he had to endure for several miles the society of a rival Fakir—a Pandarom enthusiast, who wore an iron garden-gate, of considerable weight and size, riveted round his neck as a penance, which excited the charity and fear of all who beheld him; but on the fortieth day after the retreat from Cabul began, Waller, to his joy, saw once more before him the vast and fertile plain of Jellalabad, the stately city with all its white wails and round towers, and its green background of magnificent mountains, many of them being wooded to the summit; but, to his eye, the most pleasing features in the scene were the scarlet coats of the sentinels on the ramparts of the Bala Hissar, on which the union-jack was waving in the morning wind.
Waller was, perhaps, not much given to prayer, but his emotions of gratitude to Heaven were great and keen when at last he found himself passing between the Piper's Hill and the old Mosque that stands south of the city, round the walls of which he had to proceed between the Shah's garden and the great citadel to reach the Peshawur Gate, where a guard of Her Majesty's 13th Light Infantry (Prince Albert's own) was posted; and the astonishment of the soldiers, when they heard themselves accosted in pure English by a Hindoo Fakir, was intense; but the officer in command, Lieutenant Sinclair—the same ingenious fellow who had built the pleasure boat during the previous and happier winter at Cabul—now came hastily forward.
"Waller—Bob Waller, by all that's wonderful!" he exclaimed, recognising an old friend in spite of his filthy disguise; "so you, too, have escaped, after all?"