Captain Townshend still continued the work of demolishing the outer walls beyond the main wall of the fort whenever opportunity occurred and he had time to spare. He used the Punyalis for this, and they did it, he says, marvellously quickly. They crept along on their stomachs outside the walls, and with beams of wood pushed down the light outer walls which ran out round the fort. The enemy fired incessantly upon them while the work was being carried out, but nobody was hit. Thirty rounds a day were also fired at the house in which Sher Afzul lived, in order to cause him annoyance, and let him see that the garrison were awake. When an attack was made at night, and there was no firing, the average amount of ammunition expended during the first two or three weeks of the siege was between forty and fifty rounds of Martini-Henry, and twenty or thirty rounds of Snider ammunition daily. To guard against attack by night, arrangements had to be made for lighting up the ground immediately outside the walls of the fort. At first, light balls made up of chips of wood and resinous pine, and soaked in kerosene oil, were lighted and thrown over the walls. But there were not sufficient materials to carry on this method nightly; and the defenders adopted the better plan of building out platforms from the walls, and on these lighting fires which would keep the ground in the vicinity of the fort illuminated for the entire night. On the night of the 13th-14th of March the enemy made an attack on the east face, outside which is a garden with a number of large trees. They sounded the advance on a bugle, and with much shouting and beating of tom-toms, and keeping up a straggling fire they advanced to the attack. The garrison received them with a brisk fire, and though men had been heard by the defenders shouting to them repeatedly to come and attack the water-way, they gradually slunk off back to their own lines. Finding the enemy still had an intention of attacking the water-way, Captain Townshend further strengthened the way to the river, loopholing and occupying the stables just by the gate. A letter was received from Sher Afzul on the 15th of March in which the would-be Mehtar said that a party of troops escorting an ammunition convoy had been surrounded and defeated at Reshun; and further, that a British officer, who had come down from Mastuj, had also been taken prisoner, and that he had written a letter to Dr. Robertson, which Sher Afzul would deliver if the British Agent would send some one to receive it. This was the news of the disaster to Captain Ross, and Lieutenants Edwardes' and Fowler's parties. But the officers in Chitral refused to believe it. On the following day, however, a letter written by Lieutenant Edwardes from Reshun on the 13th of March was received, and in it he gave the news of the attack upon his party, and of his being shut up in the post which he had fortified.