They had crossed a broad haze of the midday heat, but now above the mist descried a broken sea of mountains, a storm of rock, which was called Afghanistan. Far to the left, fain in the distance rose a rock platform, old Herat. Beyond lay Persia whose king, the Shah-in-Shah, had lately laid siege with seventy thousand men, to the rock fortress. "The Afghans there," said Rain, "were yelping coyotes until the young spy came. He made them mountain lions."
"Who is the young spy?"
Eldred Pottinger was his name, but in Rain's telling the words were not much like that. While Pottinger was busy saving Herat from the Persians, a British field force had conquered Afghanistan. But there arose an Afghan chief named Akbar, who brought about a revolt against the British. It burst like a volcano, and the British leaders lost their heads. Their army was caught in the Khyber, and only one man escaped, a Doctor Brydon. Rain had held him steady on his dying horse until he crossed the Indian boundary to Fort Jellalabad. She told the story next of General Sale, and his young warriors cut off in Afghanistan, corralled by Akbar's army. During three whole moons under fire they built the walls of their stronghold; then on the ninetieth day an earthquake knocked their fortress flat, and left them at Akbar's mercy. "That," said Rain, "is when I learned what prayers can do. Oh, if you had seen the chief Havelock with his young men charge, stampeding Akbar's tribes—like dust before a cyclone!
"See, Stoneheart, yonder, far in the north, is Kohistan. There was the young spy with his regiment of the Ghoorka tribe, fighting his way southward. He was wounded and nearly dead. He had five warriors left when he came to the gates of Cabul."
"Five men!"
"Then," answered Rain, "but now! See, all along this roadside, the regiments of his Afghan army camped, asleep through the heat of the day, until his trumpets call at sundown. See here, outside this little wayside fort, are forty great chiefs and medicine men of his Council.
"Where is the young spy?"
"That shabby Afghan sitting half asleep in the shadow of the gate."
"You say he raised and leads an army?"
"Yes, these Afghan tribesmen think that he is a sort of god. He leads them against Akbar, their own king."