“You need not take my light if they are.”
“Oh, sir!” he said, reproachfully, “you King’s doctor, and people see you have candle in bottle! Shame come for you!”
“Where does the shame come in?” I asked.
“Sir, you not know: men of Afghanistan very fool men, a little they talk if they see.”
The Sample Case of Cigars.
The arrival turned out to be a messenger from the Palace with a letter and a parcel from His Highness. The parcel was a sample case of cigars, and the letter, in the Amîr’s handwriting, directed me to smoke and choose: I was to let His Highness know which were the best, and he would order a supply of them.
The Amîr’s writing is peculiar. He uses a steel pen, not the native reed pen: like many other illustrious men, he cannot be considered a good penman.
The next day was dull and rainy, but we had a glorious sunset. The sky, in its depth, was a perfect blue, which grew fainter and faded to primrose as it neared the mountains half hid in the piled up clouds. The summits, huge and rugged, had torn through the layers of cloud and shone red in the sun: their bold and rigid outlines, casting deep purple shadows, were cut off from the calm of the sky by the heavy clouds piled up behind them. These great masses, though seemingly almost as solid as rock, had softer outlines than the rugged peaks, and they showed great billowy waves of red light and deep shadow. Below the peaks the clouds hung in drawn-out layers, the lights and shadows becoming lost in grey and brown: lower, all was lost in a depth of deep purple blue, which mingled with the rich green brown of the darkened and foreshortened treeless plain. Sharp against all this depth of purple and green were the leafless branches and myriad branchlets of the trees of Mazar, red gold in the sun.
