The Far Pavilions (138 page)

‘How can you say that when you must know that every time you enter its gates, you walk into danger?’ protested Anjuli. ‘My love, I beg of you –’

But Ash only shook his head and stifled her words with kisses, and when he tore himself away it was to go to the Bala Hissar, where, as he well knew, the room in which he would work overlooked the Residency and the compound in which the British Mission had been housed.

60

The ancient citadel of the Amirs of Afghanistan was built upon the steep slopes of a fortified hill, the Shere Dawaza, that dominated the city and a large part of the valley of Kabul.

It was surrounded by a long, rambling outer wall, some thirty feet high and pierced by four main gateways that were flanked by towers and topped with crumbling battlements. Within this were other walls, one of which enclosed the Amir's palace in the upper Bala Hissar. Higher still stood the fort, while above it the whole Shere Dawaza hill was ringed by a wall that climbed the steep flanks and followed the line of the rocky heights, so that sentries manning the blockhouses here could look out at the enormous circle of mountain ranges, and down on palace and city, the entire sweep of the valley and the wide, winding ribbon of silver that was the Kabul River.

The lower Bala Hissar was a town in itself, crammed with the houses of courtiers and officials and all those who worked for them, and possessing its own shops and bazaars. It was in this part of the citadel that the Residency stood, and from his window Ash could see the whole stretch of the compound – the clutter of servants' quarters and store rooms, the cavalry pickets and the stables at the far end, lying almost in the towering shadow of the Amir's great Arsenal, and directly below him the barracks, an oblong, fort-like structure that enclosed a line of covered quarters on either side, and was bisected by a long open courtyard entered through a deep archway at one end and a stout door at the other.

Behind that far door a narrow lane divided the barrack block from the Residency proper, which consisted of two separate houses facing each other across a walled courtyard some ninety feet square, in the nearer and taller of which Wally, Secretary Jenkyns and Surgeon Kelly had their rooms, while the Envoy himself occupied the other: a two-storey building that on the southern side was part of the outer wall of the citadel, so that the windows there had a sheer drop below them to the moat, and a magnificent view of the valley and the far snows.

Ash too shared that view, since not only the Envoy's house but the far side of the entire compound stopped at the thirty-foot drop of the wall, beyond which stretched the open country, the river and the hills and the vast panorama of the Hindu Kush. But the beauty of the view held no interest for him – his attention being reserved for the compound below, where he could catch an occasional glimpse of the Envoy and his suite, watch their servants and the men of the Escort busy about their duties, and keep a check on callers at the Residency – and an eye on Wally's comings and goings.

Wally, like Anjuli, had formed an unfavourable impression of the Bala Hissar, though for different reasons. He did not find it sinister: he thought it deplorably shoddy. Having expected the famous citadel to be a magnificent and impressive place (something along the lines of Shah Jehan's Red Fort at Delhi, only better, as it was built on a hill), he had been disgusted to find it a rabbit-warren of dilapidated buildings and fetid alleyways, huddled behind a series of irregular and often half-ruined walls and interspersed by what appeared to be waste ground on which little or nothing grew.

The grandly styled ‘Residency’ had proved equally disappointing, being no more than a number of mud-brick buildings in a large compound that was hemmed about, on three sides, by houses built on rising ground, and on the fourth by the south wall of the citadel.

There was not even a proper entrance gate, and the sole barrier between the compound and the surrounding houses was a crumbling mud wall that a child of three could scramble over without difficulty; which augured a complete lack of privacy, as any member of the public who wished to do so could stroll in without let or hindrance to gaze at the Escort, hang around the stables watching the horses being groomed and fed, or even (if the doors of the barrack block were open) stare through the long central courtyard at the Residency itself.

‘Faith, it's a combination of a gold-fish bowl and a rat-trap, so it is,’ pronounced Wally that first afternoon in the Bala Hissar, as he and the surgeon surveyed the place that was to be the home of the British Mission. His critical gaze travelled to the towering bulk of the Arsenal, and from there to the tiers of tall, flat-roofed Afghan houses that overlooked the compound. Behind and above these rose the walls and windows of the palace; and above again, the fortified heights of the Shere Dawaza…

‘Glory be, will you look at that now!’ exclaimed Wally, appalled. ‘We might just as well be living on the floor of a bull-ring or the Circus Maximus, with every seat filled with spectators staring down on us, watching every move we make and hoping to see us bite the dust. What's more, they can get in here as easy as winking, while we can't get out if they choose to stop us bad cess to them.
Brrr
! it's enough to give one the creeps. We shall have to do something about this.’

‘What? If that is not a leading question?’ inquired Dr Kelly absently, surveying the surroundings from a professional viewpoint that took account of drains, smells, sanitation (or lack of it), the direction of the prevailing wind and the source of water, while Wally was interested only in the military angle.

‘Well, put the place into a state of defence, to begin with,’ said Wally promptly. ‘Build a good stout wall across the entrance of the compound, with a door we can bar from this side: an iron one for choice. And get another one put up on this side of that archway bit that leads into the barracks, and close both ends of the lane that runs behind it, so that if there should be a shindy we could stop anyone getting at the Residency itself except through the barracks; or into the compound, once we'd closed the gate. As things are now, we'd be sitting ducks if anyone wanted to attack us.’

‘Ah, come now, no one's going to attack us,’ returned the doctor comfortably. ‘The Amir won't be wanting another war on his hands, and as he'll know that's the quickest way to get one, he'll take good care to see there's no trouble. Besides, the Bala Hissar is his own particular stamping-ground, which means that while we are here he is our host; and I'll have you know that Afghans are very punctilious on the subject of hospitality and the treatment of guests, so you can stop worrying and relax. In any case, there isn't much you can do about it, for if all those spectators you mentioned – the boyos up there in the dress-circle and the gallery – decided to turn their thumbs down, they could pick us off one by one as easy as wink your eye.’

‘That's just what I said,’ returned Wally forcefully. ‘I said we'd be sitting ducks, and it's not a role that appeals to me. Nor do I think it's a good idea to put temptation into the heads of the ungodly. Remember the C.O. of that Yeomanry regiment that was stationed in Peshawar a couple of years ago?’

‘If you mean old “Bloater” Brumby, yes – vaguely. I thought he was dead.’

‘He is. He died during a period of piping peace while the Brigade were on autumn manoeuvres near the Frontier. Took a stroll on his own one evening all dressed up in his scarlet-coated best because some big-wig had come out from Peshawar that day, and was standing around admiring the view when a tribesman picked him off. The tribal elders were most apologetic, but they insisted that it was the Colonel-Sahib's own fault for providing such a beautiful target that the temptation had been too great for poor Somebody-or-other Khan, who had not been able to resist taking a shot at him. They were sure the Sahibs would understand that there was no malice about it.
Verb. sap
.!’

‘
Hmm.
’ The doctor glanced up at the rooftops and the small barred or latticed windows that looked down on the British Mission's compound, and said: ‘Yes, I see what you mean. But we're in a cleft stick, Wally. You'll just have to grin and bear it, and trust to the luck of the Irish that no marksman finds us an equally tempting target. Because there's nothing to be done about it at all, at all.’

‘We'll see about that,’ retorted Wally vigorously. And that same evening, when the Envoy and his suite returned from paying their first official visit at the palace, he had spoken about it to William Jenkyns, and later to Sir Louis himself; only to receive a dusty answer from both. Nothing, as Ambrose Kelly had predicted, could or would be done. For the simple reason that refusal to occupy the accommodation that had been placed at their disposal would be grossly discourteous, while to demand that it be made secure against attack would be regarded as an insult not only to the Amir, but to the Commander-in-Chief of the Afghan Army, General Daud Shah, together with practically every high-ranking official in Kabul.

Nor was it possible for the members of the Mission to take matters into their own hands and set about closing off the compound or improvising defences, for to be seen doing anything of the kind could only suggest that they distrusted their host and were afraid of being attacked – which could not fail to offend the Amir and Daud Shah, and might well put ideas into the heads of many citizens who would otherwise have remained peaceably inclined.

‘In any case,’ said Sir Louis, ‘it is no bad thing that the Residency should be easily accessible to anyone who wishes to walk in. The more visitors we have the better. Our first duty is to establish friendly relations with the Afghans, and I want no one turned away, or anything done that might suggest that the public are unwelcome and that we wish to keep them at arm's length. In fact, as I have just been saying to the Amir…’

The Amir had received the British Envoy and his suite with flattering cordiality and every sign of friendship, and appeared only too willing to accede to any demand. Sir Louis' request that members of his Mission should be free to receive visits from Afghan officials and Sirdars had been instantly granted, and Sir Louis had returned to the Residency in high feather and dictated a telegram to the Viceroy that read: ‘All well. Had interview with Amir and delivered presents.’ After which he had sat down to write his first dispatches from Kabul, and been able to retire to bed that night feeling elated and confident: everything was going smoothly and his mission to Afghanistan was going to be a triumphant success.

Wally, lying awake in the house on the opposite side of the Residency courtyard, was feeling less pleased with life, having discovered that his bed contained lodgers. It had been bad enough to be reminded of the fact that another and rival Mission had also been official guests in the Residency (and not so long ago either) by finding Russian names scribbled on the walls of his room. But bed-bugs as well were beyond the line. He hoped fervently that his Russian predecessor had suffered equally badly from their attentions, and decided that if these were the best quarters that the Amir of Afghanistan could offer to high-ranking foreign guests, then the rest of the Bala Hissar must be a slum.

The house in which he lay, and the one opposite to it, were both gimcrack structures of lath and plaster supported by wooden pillars, the Envoy's house being a mere two storeys high, while the newly christened ‘Mess House’, in which the three members of the suite were quartered, was a storey higher. Both houses, after the Afghan pattern, had flat roofs that were reached by a flight of stairs, but unlike the single-storey barrack block, neither roof possessed anything that could be called a parapet, and Wally decided that he had seen considerably better buildings in many an Indian bazaar.

He was soon to discover that large, stone-built buildings, tall towers and marble minarets are unsuitable for an area that is subject to earth tremors, and though mud-bricks, wood and plaster may not make for magnificence, they can be safer. Almost the only stone-work in the compound was to be found in the large, single-storeyed barrack block, where a line of stone pillars supported a sloping verandah roof and formed an arcade on either side of the long, open courtyard that divided the quarters allotted to the Mohammedans from those of the Sikhs. Here, despite Cavagnari's orders, Wally had eventually managed to get a second door made to close the front of the open archway that led into it, on the pretext that it would ‘help to keep the place warmer in the winter’.

This archway ran back a full ten feet, like a miniature tunnel, to form a portico from which two flights of steps, one on either side of the entrance, led up in the thickness of the wall to the roof above. The inner end of this tunnel already boasted a massive iron-barred door, and now Wally had had another put in the outer one: admittedly a regrettably flimsy affair, as it was made from unseasoned planks. But in an emergency it would allow his men to use those stairways unseen.

There was a third stairway at the opposite end of the long courtyard near the door that opened on to the Residency lane. But as any attack would come from the front, the stairs in the thickness of the archway would be as vital to the defence of the barracks as the barracks were to the defence of the Residency. Not that Wally believed that there was the least likelihood of an attack, yet as this was his first solo command it behoved him to take what precautions he could – though they were few enough, in all conscience. But at least he had made a gesture in that line.