Effect on the Physician.
Presently, I began to feel a little giddy; not that I was uncomfortable—on the contrary; and it struck me what a good thing it would be to tell the Amîr an amusing story that I had suddenly thought of. I remembered, however, in time that he did not understand English, and thought that probably the point would be lost, or at any rate blunted, if it had to first penetrate an Interpreter’s head. And then it occurred to me that Vodki, or whatever the Russian abomination was, followed by a whisky peg, was not a good thing for a Physician to drink, fasting. I said to His Highness, that being unaccustomed to Shrâb (alcohol), the doses I had taken were beginning, I was afraid, to affect my wits: would he allow me to withdraw.
“Be not disturbed,” His Highness said. “I can cure you.”
He ordered a cup of strong tea, with a lemon squeezed in it, and directed me to drink it at once. It certainly did clear my head in a wonderful way. By-and-bye, I got away to my room and went to sleep in the arm-chair.
The Amîr approved of the whisky, and requested me to write at once to Mr. Pyne to order three casks. In due time they arrived.
A day or two afterwards the Amîr had an alarming head symptom. He described his feelings when I went to see him. There was a sort of aura passing from the feet to the head, buzzing in the ears, headache, and a feeling of great heaviness in the head. I was afraid the symptoms might be the forerunners of an apoplectic, or some nervous seizure. Happily, however, the head symptoms gradually subsided, and two days afterwards the pain had returned to the limbs.
Meanwhile, I had got to work again at the Hospital. The severer cases had accumulated considerably, and I had several surgical operations to do. One was a Stone operation on a small boy, which interested Prince Habibullah very much. The boy got well very quickly, and I took him, with a Workshop accident case that had recovered, to the Durbar that the Prince was holding in the Salaam Khana.
During the Amîr’s illness, Prince Habibullah had relieved His Highness of a great deal of Governmental work. Sitting for hours nearly every day, he held Durbars and gave decisions in cases of dispute. He was the Chief Civil Magistrate of the town. Minor cases were decided by the “Kôtwal,” or Chief of the Military Police of Kabul.
In addition to these Civil Magistracies there is an Ecclesiastical Court, presided over by the Chief Priest, the “Khân-i-Mullah Khan,” for the Priests are those who are learned in the Mahomedan law. There is always, however, the final right of appeal to the Sovereign: though I have heard the Amîr himself apply to the Khân-i-Mullah for instruction on certain points of law.