CHAPTER XXI.
WALLER'S ADVENTURES.
"Run to earth at last!" groaned Bob Waller, whose subsequent perils were so varied and remarkable that they alone, if fully detailed, might fill a volume.
In that cavern or fissure, one of the many which abound in the rocks there, he lay the whole day, untraced and undiscovered, for the Afghans, after having stripped and mutilated in their usual fashion, the dead on the snow-covered knoll, had retired. He knew that he was only sixteen miles from that bourne they had all hoped to reach—Sale's little garrison in Jellalabad, and that if he ever attained it at all, the attempt must be made in the night. He was without a guide; he knew not the way, and his dress and complexion would render him to every shepherd, wayfarer, and marauding horseman, apparent, as a Feringhee and an enemy.
The whole affair, the retreat, and the result of it, seems to be what a French writer describes as "one of those especial visitations of Fate, which draw on the devoted to their ruin, and which it is impossible for virtue to resist, or human wisdom to foresee."
After seven days and nights of incessant fighting; after the perpetual ringing of musketry, the yells of the Afghans, the varied cries of those who perished in agony under their hands; after all the truly infernal uproar and mad excitement in those dark and narrow Passes, the unbroken silence around him now, seemed intense and oppressive. He could almost imagine that he heard it; stirred though it was only by the low hum of insect life among the withered leaves and coss, or wild mountain grass, that lay drifted by the wind in heaps within the cave, and on which he lay so sad and weary.
"Now," thought he, after some hours had passed, "now that this horrible row is all over, I'll have a quiet weed—smoke a peaceful calumet of Cavendish;" and he drew the materials therefor from the pocket of his poshteen.
Waller had always been solicitous about the colouring of that same calumet, as he styled his meerschaum pipe, which, by the bye, had been a gift from his friend Polwhele—poor Jack Polwhele—who was lying under that ghastly pile of dead on the knoll, where his jovial soul had ebbed through his death-wound, and where in his kind heart, and on his pallid lips, as he breathed his last, his mother's name had mingled with that of his God;—and so, as Waller smoked amid the silence and gloom of the wintry eve, tears rolled over his cheek—the bitter tears of a brave man's rage and grief.
This was not war but carnage!
To Waller it seemed as if a gory curtain had fallen between him and all his past life. Where were now his companions of the parade, the mess, and the race-course? Where the brave rank and file, that had stood by him shoulder to shoulder, and every man of whom deemed Captain Waller a friend, as much as an officer? Where were the faces and voices of all he had known and loved? As he lay there alone in cold and darkness, his emotions were somewhat akin to those described as being felt by the last man, when the whitening skeletons of nations were around him, and when all the human world had—himself excepted—passed away.