Outside the city are also soldier guards from various regiments, but these are mostly posted about Arak and the new part of the city. Both these guards and the Kotwali guards have, in the present Amir’s time, been much increased, so that in some places one is challenged every hundred yards or so at night. Kotwali stations have also been lately placed on all roads about four miles out of the city to prevent any one leaving without a road pass, so that no one can now travel even five or six miles out into the country without permission. At times, on distant stations, the Kotwali sepoy on guard is attacked and killed at night for the sake of his rifle, and the body of one of them who was killed at Baber (which is only two miles south of the city), was hacked to pieces, possibly because he made a good fight for his life and injured some of his assailants. The prisons in Kabul are not buildings erected for that purpose, but any house belonging to the Government which is suitably situated is used as a prison, and continues in such use. Strong bars are fixed across the windows to prevent the escape of those who are confined there, and the outer door is made strong and padlocked, and has a guard of Kotwali sepoys stationed inside it. The space at disposal in such houses is very inadequate to the number of prisoners; but that is not regarded at all by the authorities, who would laugh at the idea of properly housing such animals as prisoners, nor do they insist on the prisons being kept clean, or in any way healthy. There is absolutely no thought of sanitation, and the prisoners are herded together in a house that has perhaps been used as a prison for twenty or thirty years, and never cleaned. Consequently, typhus and other diseases are common among prisoners, and typhus alone will very often sweep off seventy to eighty per cent. of the men confined there, and the wonder is that all do not die.