Chikki was now at the zenith of his power. Eight thousand riflemen, all armed with weapons of precision and all good shots, obeyed his call, and he was able to build a strong fort at Chinarak, in the Zaimukht Mountains, which he garrisoned with his bodyguard of outlaws, while acres of rich land all round brought him supplies of grain and other produce, which enabled him to offer to all who came that open-handed, unstinting hospitality which is the surest path to popularity in Afghanistan. Yet withal he maintained his simple mode of life and plain hillman’s costume; and once when he came down into Sadda, a town in British territory, to meet the great Political Officer there, he formed a marked contrast to the gay clothes and coloured shawls and gold-banded turbans of the Sahib’s satellites. He wore simply shirt and trousers of plain homespun, and a black turban, ornamented only by a fringe with a few beads on, and had on his feet a pair of palm-leaf sandals, such as could be bought in any bazaar for the sum of one anna. But his rifle was the best there, and the well-filled cartridge-belt and the six-chambered revolver buckled on excited the envy of many a man round him, while the firm tread and the thick-set frame and the determined features displayed the commanding and reckless character of the man. Yet in society that he cared for he would unbend and display a boisterous good-humour, though of a kind which would make a jest of acts of cruelty involving human suffering and even death.
As may be supposed, Chikki had many enemies who were seeking his life, and he would not allow anyone not known to him to approach him at night or even in the day, and rarely had his fingers off his revolver or the trigger of his rifle. Once he was being shaved by his barber when the foolish man said to him: “Muhammad Anim” (one of Chikki’s sworn enemies) “offered me five hundred rupees the other day if, while I was shaving you, I should slip the razor and cut your throat; but Ma’uzbillah! I seek refuge in God; I am your sacrifice, and refused the son of a pig.” Chikki said nothing then, but when the shaving was over he whipped out his revolver, and said to the luckless barber: “You refused this time, but next time the temptation may be too great for you, so I had better be first in.” The tongue of that barber wagged no more, and Chikki got a new and probably more discreet practitioner.
It fell on a day that there was illness in Chikki’s household, and someone brought him word that the Bannu doctor was in camp not far off at Thal; so it came about that while I was seeing patients by my tent that afternoon four of Chikki’s stalwarts, armed cap-à-pie, appeared with a polite and urgent request that I would accompany them back to his stronghold, Chinarak, and use my medical skill on the sick ones. As soon as the day’s work was over we started off. There was a thunderstorm on the mountains above us, and a mountain-torrent had to be crossed which would not be fordable in flood, so we urged on to a point whence a view could be got of the river-bed. On reaching it we saw the turbid waters of the flood sweeping down about a mile higher up the valley from the place where we had to cross, while we had considerably over a mile of rough ground to traverse before we could reach the ford. All pressed forward, the footmen running at the horses’ stirrups, and we just managed to get through the rising stream before the flood reached us, thus saving what would have been some hours of waiting for the flood to subside.
Chinarak is a mud fort, with towers and an intricate maze of yards, houses, and passages within; but its strength lies more in its inaccessibility, for the narrow gorge, with high, overhanging cliffs, by which we approached might easily be defended by a few marksmen. On the north side, however, the approach to it is easier. After the sick had been seen, Chikki informed me that, as he had heard that I was a preacher of the Injil, he wished to hear me, so that he might judge of the comparative merits of Christianity and Muhammadanism; and to that purpose he had called his Mullah, and we two should sit on either side and speak in turn, while he judged. His men collected round us, truly a motley crew, nearly all of them men who had fled across the border from British justice for some murder or other crime, and had found congenial employment in his bodyguard. I had just been visiting some of their houses professionally, and found representatives of all the tribes down the frontier, and even a few Hindustanis. There they were, with a devil-may-care look in their truculent faces, which made you feel that they would take half a dozen lives, to rob a cottage, with as little compunction as if they were cutting sugar-cane. Perhaps Chikki thought I was eyeing my congregation suspiciously, for he turned to me with a twinkle, and said: “Do not alarm yourself about all these fellows round. They may be all rascals, no doubt; but I have my Martini-Henry here, and if anyone molests you, I will send a bullet through him.” No doubt with a good aim, too, for he was reputed the best marksman in the tribe, a fact which I may illustrate by an anecdote.
Like most Afghans, he was very punctilious in the performance of the prescribed Muhammadan prayers, and beyond the regular five times used to indulge in those prayers of supererogation which Muhammad appointed for the devout, or for those who had sins which might be expiated by their performance. Chikki, too, appeared to believe that he kept a credit and debit account of this kind, and that some particularly unwarranted murder would be suitably balanced by the repetition of a number of extra prayers. He had a little book of Arabic prayers called the “Ganj-el-Arus” hung round his neck, and, when at leisure from his more warlike pursuits, would employ himself in the repletion of his credit account therefrom. He handed the book to me, and showed me with some little pride a prayer in it which he said he had composed himself, and which he said was always heard. It was in his own vernacular Pashtu, for he did not know Arabic; and the prayer was that, whenever he raised his rifle to his shoulder to shoot, the bullet might not miss its mark.
Before I came away I left some Pashtu Testaments and other literature with Chikki, and I have reason to believe that he studied them with interest. He, at least, gave up some of his predatory and warlike habits, and devoted himself to more peaceful avocations. When the frontier war of 1897 broke out, not long after, and the tribes all round him were flocking round the standards of jehad, and the tocsin of war resounded from the valleys of Swat in the north to the Suliman Mountains of Waziristan in the south, he resisted all the allurements of the Mullahs to take part in the campaign against the Kafirs, the English, and restrained the men of his own tribe from any participation in the warfare. It can be seen by a reference to the map that this abstention of the Zaimukht tribe, which numbers about eight thousand fighting men, made a considerable difference to the troops acting in the Miranzai and Kurram Valleys, in the angle between which their territory is situate.
He pressed me to begin medical mission work in his own territory, and promised me support, both material and influential, if I would do so. It was a tempting field, and, no doubt, it would have exerted a widespread influence for peace on the neighbourhood; but there were insurmountable difficulties of another nature, and the project had to be abandoned.
A few years ago I heard with regret that my old friend Chikki had been ambuscaded by a section of the Khujjal Khel Wazirs, with whom he had an old-standing quarrel. He and the men with him fell riddled with bullets, and the victors exultingly cut out his heart and bore it off in triumph, boasting that it weighed ten seers (twenty pounds).