Raiders of the Sarhad / Being an Account of the Campaign of Arms and Bluff Against the Brigands of the Persian-Baluchi Border during the Great War

by R. E. H. Dyer

Stumbling and slipping over the broken ground in the pitch darkness, the lamp barely lighting up my immediate path, I had wandered some distance from the car when I heard voices. Instantly I thought of the Raiders who were over-running the district. It would be too galling, too humiliating to be captured by them before the campaign, on which I was building such high hopes, had even begun.

Noiselessly I put out the lamp and listened in the dense darkness. There was absolute silence for some minutes, and I stood stock still. Then voices sounded again, and I conjectured that there were not more than two, or at the most three, speakers.

I thought rapidly, and finally decided that there would not be many men in front of me. Had there been anything approaching an encampment of the Raiders in the neighbourhood, there would have been lights, camp fires and considerable noise. The voices I had heard probably belonged to men who had seen the lights of the car, and had come to find out what it was.

I turned swiftly and made my way back to the car, where I had foolishly left my revolver. Recovering my weapon I warned Allan in a whisper of the voices I had heard, and told him to be ready to stand by. Then I made my way back in the darkness, and when I had regained the spot, called out loudly, in Hindustani, "Who's there?"

Instantly a voice answered, "I am Idu of the Chagai Levies, friendly to the British Government."

I then called out who I was, and, immediately, three fully armed men came forward in the darkness.

I asked them what they were doing there, and the voice that had answered me before replied that they were all three members of the Chagai Levies, and that they, and about fifty others, had come out to fight me.

"To fight me?" I exclaimed. "Whatever for?"

"Well, Sahib," returned the man who had said his name was Idu, "we thought you were a German airship." And he went on to explain that for a long time he and his companions had been watching powerful lights floating about in the sky, and as they knew that Germans were the only people in the world who had hawaiijihaz or airships, they were convinced the lights they had seen belonged to one of these. And when it had alighted on the hill in front of them, the majority of his companions had been so terrified that they had run away, and only himself and his two comrades had had the bravery to stay where they were and face the unknown danger.