The sputtering fire of the long juzails, concentrating to a roar at times, filled all these savage defiles with countless and incessant puffs of white smoke, that started from among the grey impending rocks, where the great yellow gourds, the purple grapes, and the scarlet creepers grew in wild luxuriance; from dark and cavernous fissures and the green groves of the pine and the plane tree. Every beetling crag was fringed with curling smoke, and streaked with fire, scaring the mountain eagles high into mid air, while with every shot that helped to thin our ranks the shrill cry of _Allah Ackbar!_ (God is mighty) was echoed from side to side, to die upward, yet, we hoped, to find no echo in heaven. A little way within the eastern entrance to the series of defiles, at the village of Jugdulluck, where the mountains are between five and six thousand feet above the sea's level, there was a peculiarly fierce encounter; for there the Afghans, led by the Arab Hadji Abdallah Osman, and inflamed to religious fury by his precepts and mad example, had fortified the summit of the Pass by earthworks and some of our own captured cannon; but, mounting the steep heights on each side, the 9th and 13th Regiments turned the flank of their position, and by the bayonet drove away the defenders amid terrible slaughter, neither side asking or hoping for quarter. From point to point at other places were fierce contests; and now, as our soldiers opened up with the cold steel those Passes which had been closed to all Europeans for the past eight months, their onward march--a series of prolonged conflicts, in fact--exhibited to them an awful and harrowing scene. CHAPTER XV. THE BATTLE OF TIZEEN. From out of the Passes, dark and shadowing, the reverberating echoes of the adverse musketry roused black clouds of vultures, with angry croak and flapping wing. It would seem almost as if all the obscene birds of Asia had been wont to seek, for months past, this ghastly place--to make it their undisturbed rendezvous; and such, no doubt, it had been, for there, "Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown," all belted and accoutred in the rags of their uniform, just as the death-shots had struck them down, and as they had fallen over each other in piles, lay the remains of Elphinstone's slaughtered army.