The two names in India most fascinating to me were Kashmir and Afghanistan. I longed to see Afghanistan even more than I longed to see Kashmir. I knew hosts of men who had been in Kashmir; I knew four or five women who had lived there. I knew two or three men who had been in Afghanistan, but no woman, and the men had not stayed there long, nor had they seen much. One of them was a fairly high official. He had ridden out every morning in Kabul. He was attended by a subservient retinue, provided by the Ameer. When he mounted they salaamed until their foreheads touched their saddle-cloths. If he rode to the right he was followed humbly; if he rode to the left he was stopped humbly, but effectually. “There was cholera in that part of the town. Their master, the Ameer, would command their death did they allow his English brother to catch infection.”
AFREDEEDS AT THE KHYBER PASS. Page 329.
All this fired my desire to see Afghanistan. The journey from Rawal Pindi to Peshawar was extremely trying. The weather was vivid, the topography of the country was flat, and it was unrelieved by architecture of any interest. We stopped a few days at Campbellpore, the most uninteresting cantonment in India, in spite of the elephants who salute and salaam, and in spite of the splendid regimental drag. I shall remember the kindness of the “Elephant Battery” when I have forgotten Campbellpore; but at the time Campbellpore was a geographical horror—mitigated by the regiment—but still a horror.
After we left Campbellpore we crossed the Attock Bridge. We tried to think it picturesque, because it was so famous. It was not picturesque, unless the sightseer was endowed with an imagination that saw beauty in any spot superlatively arid.
It never rains at Peshawar; so all the officers of the Scots Fusiliers say; but it was raining when our train crawled into the station, and it rained most of the time we were there. I had a petty triumph at Peshawar, and a bitter disappointment. I had been told—worse than that, my husband had been told—that I could not go into the native city without the protecting presence of numerous Englishmen. Nevertheless, every day for two weeks I spent several hours in Old Peshawar with only my ayah, our chokera, and our gharri wallah and sais. I did not suffer the least inconvenience from my foolhardiness.
To a woman there is nothing more delightful in being in India than the delight of buying, for a few pence, a something that she feels sure will be to her an artistic delight, for many years of colourless Western residence. The Indian artisans, or the Indian artists (for in India the highest art is highly mechanical) lack the fine exactitude and the superlative grace of the Japanese amateurs. But no art is so characteristic as the Indian art. They have inherited everything, they have invented nothing, nor do they appropriate anything. The very rigidity of the Indian caste lines has kept the Indian art lines pure, if it has also kept them crude. When you are in Peshawar you are so near the borderland, across which the bravest British soldier goes with more or less trepidation, that the most callous European tourist is justified in feeling himself dangerously near the interesting cradle of Indian art. You can buy a great many things in Peshawar; you can buy two things there that you can buy nowhere else in perfection—waxwork and the skins of snow-leopards.
We associate leopards with torrid jungles, but, on the principle that the greatest heat is cold and the extremest cold hot, the Indian leopards sometimes find their way up to the snows of the Himalayas. The baby leopards that are born there are gray and white, not brown and yellow. They are rare, and still more rarely caught. They are called “snow-leopards”; they look as if they were thickly powdered with snow, and they smell of the high, cold hills. I bought the skin of one in Peshawar for forty rupees—about three pounds. It was beautifully marked; the claws were perfect, and the teeth impressive. A few days ago, I was asked ten pounds for the skin of a clawless, toothless snow-leopard—a manufactured, European-looking fellow—and I was inclined to doubt if he had seen as much of the Himalayas as I had.
“Waxwork” is more difficult of description. I am too ignorant of Oriental mythology to appreciate the peculiarities of Oriental anatomy as portrayed on Indian purdahs; and the Peshawar waxwork is very anatomical. Three-legged cows follow five-legged cows in the wake of a mightily-turbaned Rajah, who sits astride a very peculiarly constructed peacock. I have often had my fragile heart broken by seeing displayed in a London shop the duplicate of some article I had bought in the East—some article I had thought unobtainable in Europe. But I believe I am quite secure in my sole possession of some very fine specimens of Peshawar waxwork. You can buy waxwork in almost every Indian bazaar and in half a dozen London shops, but only the cheaper sorts. The wonderful curtains, teeming with wax representations of Indian life and Indian history; purdahs, over which expert Indian artists spend months and even years, can only be bought, I believe, in two or three shops in Old Peshawar. I bought some wonderful bits of metal work in Peshawar. I have one quaint vessel, so characteristic in its shape that, though it has never been used, I always fancy it smells of coffee. I bought a marvellous little table of fine Kashmir work, and a ridiculous native chair constructed in the coarsest way. The two are typical of the most careful extreme and of the most careless extreme of Indian workmanship.