A few persons passed them, some going to market in the Char-chowk, others afield to tend the trellised vines; but she dared neither speak nor show her pallid face. She might find mercy at the hands of Zohrab, but none among the rabble of Cabul, where the miserable remains of the Queen's Envoy yet hung unburied in the great bazaar. Mabel knew but too well, by observation and experience, the nature of the nation among whom she now found herself--alone. Nearly forty years had made no change on the people, since a Scottish traveller described them; and his pithy account may be summed up in the following quotation:-- "If a man could be transported to Afghanistan without passing through the dominions of Turkey, Persia, or Tartary, he would be amazed by the wide and unfrequented deserts and the mountains covered with perennial snow. Even in the cultivated part of the country he would discover a wild assemblage of hills and wastes, unmarked by enclosures, not embellished by trees, and destitute of navigable canals, public roads, and all the great and elaborate productions of human refinement and industry. He would find the towns few and far distant from each other; he would look in vain for inns and other conveniences, which a traveller would meet with in the wildest parts of Great Britain. Yet he would sometimes be delighted with the fertility and population of particular plains and valleys, where he would see the productions of Europe mingled in profusion with those of the torrid zone, and the land tilled with an industry and judgment nowhere surpassed. He would see the inhabitants accompanying their flocks in tents or villages, to which the terraced roofs and mud walls give an appearance entirely novel. He would be struck with their high and harsh features, their sun-burnt countenances, their long beards, loose garments, and shaggy cloaks of skins. When he entered into society, he would notice the absence of all courts of justice, and of everything like an organised police. He would be surprised at the fluctuation and utter instability of every civil institution. He would find it difficult to comprehend how a nation could subsist in such disorder, and pity those who were compelled to pass their days amid such scenes, and whose minds were trained by their unhappy situation to fraud and violence, to rapine, deceit, and cruel revenge. Yet he could not fail to admire their lofty and martial spirit, their hospitality, their bold and simple manners, equally removed from the suppleness of the citizen and the rusticity of the clown. In short," he adds, a stormy independence of spirit, which leads them to declare, "'We are content with fierce discord; we are content with alarm; we are content with bloodshed; but we shall _never be content_ with a master!'"