Few of them can read or write, but though illiterate they are keen-witted and speak with the terseness of a proverb. They are much quicker "at the uptake" than the Gurkha, whom they resemble in many ways. When they go to Kirkee for Pioneer training they generally come out top in the machine-gun, musketry, and signalling courses, and they make excellent surveyors. As Pioneers they are hard to beat. It will be gathered from the incident of the sepoy who was dispossessed of his tamarisk bush, that the Hazara is of a cheerful disposition. There is generally a comedian in the regiment, and after dinner at Sheikh Saad one of the men was called in to give us a kind of solo-pantomime. He began with the smart salute of the sepoy, bringing his hand down with the mechanical click of a bolt; then he gave us the Sahib's casual lifting of the cane, next he was a havildar drilling a raw recruit. He took the parts in turn and contrived some clever fooling. But I gathered that the man was only second-rate. No sooner had he made his exit than everybody in the mess lamented Faizo who beguiled so many nights of the New Zealanders on the canal, a subtle artist compared to this clown with his stock regimental turns. Faizo is the castigator of pretence, scourge of hypocrisy and the humbug of the Church. In one scene he is the shaven mullah abstractedly mumbling his prayers while he intently prepares his food. A dog comes in and defiles the dish, Faizo for the moment becomes the dog--then the mullah torn with the fury of commination, pursuing the dog with oaths and missiles and spurning the polluted food. Then the mullah again, hungry and unctuously sophisticated, blessing the food, miraculously restoring its virtue, and finding it good. No one is better at a nickname than Faizo. Few men are known in the regiment by the name their father gave them. They are remembered by some oddity or unhappy lapse of conduct, or the place they come from, and Faizo is the regimental godfather of them all. There is Mahomet Ulta--Mahomet upside down--who always gets hold of the wrong end of the stick; Ser Khuskh--the dry-head, and "The Mullah," and "Kokri Gulpusht," "the frog with a shining posterior," who looks as if his face had been glazed. Also there is Ghulam Shah the "Maygaphon." This is how he came by the name.