“Did you not recognize the cause of that noise?”
“No, Sir,” I answered, “I thought it was the wind.”
He laughed and said—
“It was an earthquake! Another time you must be quicker and get out of the house.” He said that the motion of the earth in an earthquake, at any given spot, was in a vertical, not a horizontal direction. Were it in a horizontal direction, he said, the very mountains would fall. Being in a vertical direction the pressure on the beams of a house, owing to the weight of the roof, becomes excessive, and they are likely to give way. For this reason it is advisable to get out into the open when an earthquake commences.
Soon after this His Highness wrote a few words on a slip of paper, and calling the Armenian to him he handed him the paper. When the Armenian returned to me he whispered that the Amîr had increased my pay considerably. I commenced to thank His Highness, but he smiled, and silenced me by raising his hand.
About four o’clock, dinner was brought. For me a European one was provided, the only peculiarity of which was that the soup followed the fish.
After dinner, His Highness asked me if I was returning to Kabul that night, or whether I would remain at Paghman till the morning. As I had six horses with me I decided to return. His Highness asked me before I left to visit the “Ferrash-bashi,” or “Keeper of the Carpets,” who was ill. This was the gentleman I met first in Turkestan, who struck me as being “not such a villain as he looked.”
Accordingly, I called upon him at his house in Paghman, which was some distance down the hill.
I found he had had a stroke, and was paralyzed on one side. I gave him advice, and said I would ride over in a day or two to see him again. Night came on as we were riding home, and we had to do the last two or three miles at a walk.
Arrival of English.