“Didn’t you feel the earthquake?” I said.
“The what, sir?”
“The earthquake! Why, man, the house shook.”
“Ah!” said he, “I did think a little the earth shivered, but I not notice.”
On Christmas day my fever departed. Some time before, I had written to Mr. Pyne to ask him to send me a cook, if he could find one, and on Christmas day a cook arrived bringing a box of newspapers, Graphics and Punches, and a case of briar pipes, which had reached Kabul from London.
The Graphics and Punches were a constant source of amusement to myself and my visitors, the older as well as the younger ones. I was astonished to find how little idea some of them had as to what a picture was intended to represent.
For instance, in one of the Christmas numbers—it was of the year before, but that didn’t matter—a pig was represented standing up on his hind legs to take a view of the world outside his stye. Little Mahomed Omer, son of Perwana Khan, could not make the picture out at all; finally he came to the conclusion that it represented a horse in his stable. The Armenian allowed him to remain with that idea.
The pig is unclean to the Mahomedans, and he would have been very disgusted if he had thought that we ate such a nasty creature.
A frequent visitor at this time was a young man named Shere Ali, who was, I was told, the second son of the ex-Mir of Bokhara. A friendship commenced at that time between us which, like that of the Mirza Abdur Rashid, lasted till I left the country.