“Hammond’s original idea was to meet the Pathans in battle, but he happened to see this cliff hanging precariously over the steep slope. Now Hammond was a famed engineer. Mad as he was, he did not forget his craft. As for the women and children whom his scouts reported below--this only made the madman more keen. Remember, his mother had died just there.... He looked at the slope, and saw that if he could start the cliff, he could send an avalanche upon the crowded camp. It wasn’t fighting. England wouldn’t have done it, but we’re dealing with the insanity of a single leader. Hammond had dynamite. Also the Pathans didn’t know that the English regiment was above. The cliff was aimed at the camp. The blast worked. Falling rock dug a trench in the mountain, gaining tons of power every foot of slide. What happened has been kept secret by the British, but you and I know. Twenty-five hundred Pathans--including a thousand women and children--were buried alive. If Hammond had been able to keep his remnant of a brain, it would never have come out, but he was raving when he brought his outfit back to headquarters, and this started his men to thinking. A little thinking and they understood all. The towering atrocity, no one denies, but it was done by a madman--not by England, Jerry.” “The Pathans thought it a natural landslide--until last autumn,” Cardinegh remarked, and there was exultation in his eyes. A chill swept over Routledge for an instant, as if he had been in the presence of a human without a soul. The colossal havoc wrought decades ago by an insane Englishman was not a thing to be talked about as Cardinegh talked--his eyes gleaming with triumph. Even the Afghans had never learned the truth, so perfect was the British management. They looked upon the avalanche as a dreadful chastisement of the gods. They had gone back to scratch their rocky fields and raise their scrawny lambs with a growing belief that the gods wanted the English in their land, and that gods who could turn loose mysterious landslides knew best. The ghosts of Shubar Khan’s twenty-five hundred--trooping through the monster hills on the darkest nights--they could not speak. The soldiers of the mad colonel--had they not all been divided, sent to fill the loneliest posts and the most hazardous fore-fronts, under the eyes of the secret-service men who see all and say nothing?... It was not England’s fault, this work of a crazed Englishman who undertook to avenge the massacre of the sixteen thousand. It was a thing to be hidden deep in the hearts of a few--this grim and terrible history.