Afghanistan -- Fiction; British -- Afghanistan -- Fiction; Kings and rulers -- Fiction; Political fiction
“I wasn’t King,” said Carnehan. “Dravot he was the King, and a
handsome man he looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him and
the other party stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by
the side of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped. That was
Dravot’s order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and Carnehan
and Dravot picks them off with the rifles before they knew where they
was, and runs down into the valley and up again the other side, and
finds another village, same as the first one, and the people all falls
down flat on their faces, and Dravot says,—‘Now what is the trouble
between you two villages?’ and the people points to a woman, as fair
as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back to the
first village and counts up the dead—eight there was. For each dead
man Dravot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his arms like a
whirligig and, ‘That’s all right,’ says he. Then he and Carnehan
takes the big boss of each village by the arm and walks them down into
the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear right
down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf from both sides o’ the
line. Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and all,
and Dravot says,—‘Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and
multiply,’ which they did, though they didn’t understand. Then we
asks the names of things in their lingo—bread and water and fire and
idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the
idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything
goes wrong he is to be shot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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