There was one small tamarisk bush, not more than eighteen inches high, but where it stood on the edge of the bank it threw a four-foot patch of shade; the only natural shadow to be had anywhere round. A sepoy of the regiment appropriated this. Then a jemadar came up and demanded it for himself. The sepoy pretended not to hear. "Go and relieve the sentry," his officer said, pointing to an erect figure in the sun who was being broiled by inches, "over the kit pile there by the steamer. Look alive. Clear out!" The Hazara dragged himself out of the shade, and approaching his friend the guard, caught him a resounding whack on the ear. One cannot strike an officer; yet something had to be done; one has to let steam off somehow. The guard jabbed at him with the bayonet and took himself off in good spirit. The jemadar laughed. All this horseplay was characteristic of everything I had heard of the Hazara. The psychology of it was not of the East. There was something Cockney or Celtic in the blows taken in good part, the give and take, the common-sense and easy-going humour of the scene. In the evening I went over and had a chat with the Hazara. One or two of them spoke Hindustani with the accent of a Tommy, calling me "Sabb." Finding them friendly and communicative folk, I asked them their history. They had come over with a Ghenghiz Khan, they told me, to sack Delhi; all agreed that it was Ghenghiz Khan, and that it was about 800 years ago and that they had crossed the Karakoram, and that their own particular ancestors had been left by the Khan to hold the outpost of Ghazni in Afghanistan. I looked up their history afterwards and found that they had given it me more or less as it is set down in the textbooks. Also I learnt that it is not easy for the Hazaras to leave Afghanistan. The Amir's guards have orders to hold them up at the frontier, though there are time-honoured ways in which they contrive to break the cordon, bribing the guards or slipping through in disguise, generally with the Powindah caravans. It is still more difficult for them to get home and return when on leave, and this is an embargo which indulges the Hazara's natural bent for travel. In the furlough season you will find him as far afield from cantonments as he can get in the time, often as far as Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, or Rangoon. Filthy lucre is not his motive. What he earns he spends. He has a curiosity uncommon in the Asiatic. He likes wandering and seeing the world for its own sake; he lives comfortably, is a bit of a spendthrift, gambles a lot, dresses with an air, and likes to cut a figure in a tonga where the ordinary sepoy would save a few annas by going on foot. If he belongs to a Pioneer regiment he can afford it. For the Pioneer works on a Government contract in peace time, and the Hazara thinks he has fallen on a poor job if he cannot make twelve annas extra for a day's work in addition to his pay.