The apartment in which the three were seated, each in a bamboo easy chair and wearing fur-trimmed poshteens (or native pelisses) above their blue undress surtouts, while they idled over brandy-pawnee and a box of cigars, was neither luxurious nor splendid, being simply a portion of a half shattered tower of native construction, before the windows of which the Bengal Sappers had erected a species of verandah, as a promenade and shade from the sun in summer; but now the season was winter; and though the evening was temperate, a fire blazed merrily in the open grate-less fireplace, and shed a cheerful glow on the whitewashed walls, the only adornments of which were certain caricatures (executed by Waller with burnt cork) of the regimental adjutant, of the brigade major, of "old Elphinstone," or other personages, to him more or less obnoxious. A charpoy or native bedstead, a few bullock-trunks, an overland ditto, an iron washing-stand, several pairs of boots, a few swords, whips, guns and hogspears, with any number of bottles, full or empty, littering the corners, made up the splendours of Bob Waller's quarters in the fort, from which, some two years before, Sir Robert Sale's brigade had summarily expelled sundry unwilling Kussilbashes at the point of the bayonet. The rooms of Denzil and Jack Polwhele in other parts of the same rude edifice were precisely similar; but their soldiers were hutted in the cantonments close by. One window of Waller's room faced the hills to the westward and the Arab-looking village of Behmaru, which means "the place of the husbandless," from a legend of the time of old--remote, perhaps, as the wars of Mohammed Ghori. An Afghan maid of high rank had been betrothed to a chief whom she tenderly loved; for the Afghans, though strict Mussulmen, neither seclude their wives, as others usually do, nor wed without duly winning them. But tidings came that he had fallen in battle against the Hindoos, on which she pined away and died. The news, however, was premature, for the chief recovered from his wounds, and returned to find only her grave on the hillside now called Behmaru; so he brought from Bourkhor one of those strange and spectral-like white stones, which, when placed upright, so closely resemble an eastern woman in her drapery, and set it above her tomb. In his old age he, too, was laid beneath it, and in time to come a village sprung up there.