The Seeah-Sungh hills, along the base of which lay the road between the Balla Hissar and the cantonments, were bristling with Ghilzye banditti. At that late hour, Akbar Khan declared that it would be almost impossible to restrain them, and that therefore, if the British force would secure its safety, it must abstain from prosecuting its march towards cantonments until he had made arrangements with the chiefs—in fact, that it must halt till the morrow. On that dark, frosty December night this was, indeed, a discouraging announcement. The troops were halted on low marshy ground, under the walls of the fort. The ground was white with the hoar frost. The air was bitingly cold. They would have lit fires and clustered around them, but there was no fuel in their reach. They had no tents. They had no bedding. They had no food. They were every minute expecting to be attacked by the enemy. In this cheerless, miserable state they could do nothing but stand, or walk about, looking for the rising of the morning star.[185] The night was a long one, but it came to a close at last. The miseries of the darkness were now to be succeeded by the perils of the dawn. They were only about six hundred strong, and the road was infested by thousands of the enemy. They had nothing on which to depend but the good faith of Akbar Khan and their own steadiness and courage. Happily the former did not fail them. Akbar Khan did not play the traitor. The rear-guard was molested by a party of Afghans, and the Sirdar himself, with a few followers, galloped into the midst of his hostile countrymen, and threatened to cut down all who dared to oppose the progress of the detachment. About ten o’clock the force reached cantonments in safety; but “thoroughly exhausted with hunger and fatigue.”[186]