False reporting, when found out, was a great crime in the eyes of the Amir, and such men were speedily punished with death. In some cases where a man has been wrongly killed, the old well was given the offenders to consider their crimes in. I was once in the Amir’s durbar, when fifteen or sixteen prisoners and others were brought in. Those who were prisoners were accused of false reporting, and the other men were their accusers, and six or seven of the prisoners had been submitted to the torture of the “fanah,” which is administered as follows:—A post, about six inches in diameter, is split into two pieces in the direction of its length, and the two halves are put together again, and bound with rope for one half of the length, so that when finished it somewhat resembles a huge clothes-peg. The bound end of the post is firmly fixed in the ground, with the split part projecting above the surface, and the foot of the person to be tortured is tied to the upper end of it with thin cords, which pass round both the foot and the post, and a V-shaped wedge is inserted in the slit at the top. Then, when the wedge is hammered down, it makes the two halves of the post widen out, and puts a strong tension on the cord, which binds the foot and post together. When using this instrument of torture the wedge is tapped down until the cord exercises a slight pressure on the foot, and then the questions concerning the matter requiring confession are asked, and if the tortured one refuses to speak, the wedge is hammered down a little further, making the pressure of the cord still tighter on the foot, and so the wedge continues to be hammered down until the sufferer reveals all he knows (and sometimes much that he does not know, in order to save further torture), or until the toes are practically severed from the foot, when the other foot is similarly treated. There are many who have lost their toes through mortification setting in afterwards, under the torture of the “fanah,” without confessing what they knew, and this speaks well for the endurance of the average Afghan, but the boast of the true Afghan is that he can endure pain, even to death, without a sigh or sound, and some do so. Another form of torture is to cover the top of the head with dough, which is turned up at the edges to form a cup, and into the cup so formed, boiling oil is poured; the agony as the brain begins to bake may be imagined. There are other forms of torture also, but these cannot be described.