On top of the famine that year came cholera, and the mortality was very high, for the people were weak with want of food, and their systems out of order through eating any rubbish they could get to keep off the cravings of hunger. Daily the roads leading to the burial grounds streamed with people carrying their dead, and many, I knew, who came to tell me of a mutual acquaintance whom they had taken for burial that day, were themselves carried to the same place the next day, or a day later. The cholera spread among all classes, and penetrated even to the harems of the princes, Sirdar Nasrullah Khan’s favourite wife dying of it, and among others the Amir’s favourite slave boy was carried off. Several of the highest officials also got the disease, and died of it. The members of the royal family are particularly afraid of cholera, that and earthquakes being their chief dread; and during other outbreaks the late Amir and his family, with all their officials and attendants, posted off helter-skelter from the city to Paghman the moment cholera made its appearance. When the cholera epidemic of 1900 occurred, three years before the one mentioned above, the late Amir and all his people went off at once, and the carts carrying luggage, tents, etc., people on horseback galloping, carriages driving along furiously, and the servants and soldiers on foot also hurrying on, gave to the scene all the appearance of a disorderly flight. The English (Mrs. Daly and myself were the only Europeans there at the time) were left behind to get on as best we could, and she spent the next four months in the treatment of cholera cases, whereby she saved many lives, while I occupied myself with a series of experiments in smokeless powder-making, in which I was fortunately successful, chiefly because I was left all this time untroubled and alone. [Illustration: KABULI WOMAN’S INDOOR DRESS. [_To face p. 200._]