"Do not talk thus, Sahib," said he sententiously; "know you not, that the tongue is a precious jewel, and hence it is a thousand pities we should pollute it?" "But would he dare to assassinate the Envoy?" asked Polwhele, angrily. "Tell me, Sahib, what Ackbar Khan would not dare?" responded the other, quietly. "Egad that is true, but I hope that our troops will ere long show all those fellows who plot mischief that we have not come 'thus far into the bowels of the land' for nothing," replied Polwhele, laughing; "and to-morrow I, for one, shall begin with the Ghazeeas among yonder hills, Khan." "The Siah Sung is full of deep and dark caverns, Sahib," said the friendly Afghan; "the Ghazeeas are cunning; so beware alike of surprise and ambush." "Oh that will be my look-out and Burgoyne's," replied Polwhele, confidently. "Besides, yonder hills are the chosen haunt of the Ghoul Biaban," said Taj Mohammed, and though a brave man, he lowered his voice as he spoke, for the Afghans believe devoutly in the existence of "the Spirit of the Waste," a lonely demon inhabiting the mountain solitudes; frightful he is, and gigantic in form, devouring any passenger who comes in his way; forming by spells the mirage of the desert to snare the traveller, and disinterring the dead that he may devour them like the wife of the young king of the Black Isles. "I must take my chance of the Ghoul and the Ghazeeas too; though it will be deuced hard lines to be killed by the latter and eaten, without salt, by the former," said Polwhele, laughing again. "The shadow of the Prophet be over you and your soldiers, Sahib," said the Afghan, not without a knitted brow; for though he knew perhaps, but the half of what Polwhele said, he saw in his bearing much of that disposition to ridicule, which is so thoroughly intolerable to all foreigners, and does us much mischief everywhere; and to this, and some other mistakes of manner, we owed many of the mischiefs that ensued subsequently in Cabul. "Historical truth compels us to acknowledge," says the Chaplain to the Forces, "that less regard was paid to the inhabitants than could have been wished. Though they do not, like other Mohammedans, universally shut up their women, the Afghans are as open to jealousy as Orientals in general, and treating their wives often rudely, the latter could not but be pleased with the attentions the young Feringhees showed them. It is much to be feared that our countrymen did not always bear in mind that the domestic habits of any people ought to be sacred in the eyes of strangers. And hence arose by degrees, distrust, alienation, and hostility, for which it were unfair to deny there might be some cause. Whatever errors they committed, the great mass of the garrison of Cabul atoned for them terribly."