The late Amir was very savage in punishing those who falsely reported his death. When the cholera epidemic broke out in 1900, the Amir went to live at Paghman, which is situated at the foot of the Hindu Kush, while the epidemic was raging, for the Amir and all his family greatly fear cholera, and run away at once from the affected area. Towards the close of the epidemic, two men came in to Kabul from Paghman, and gave out in the bazars that the Amir was dead of the disease; and when the Amir returned to the city a few days after, he had these men caught and brought before him, and said the wish was certainly father to the report which they had spread; so he ordered them to be cut in pieces, and their remains to be exhibited in the bazars as a warning to others. On another occasion when he had again been reported dead, he ordered the man who spread the report to be taken to the top of the Asman Heights, and there, on a part overlooking the river which is very precipitous, be put into a barrel and rolled down the mountain-side to the valley below. A similar case, but more brutally executed, was that of an old man, a moullah, who had given out that the Amir was not a true Mussulman, and was ordered to be thrown down the mountain from the same point. When thrown over the cliff, by the Kotwali sepoys, his clothes caught on a jutting rock, which suspended him, and prevented further fall, and the sepoys, releasing the clothes, took the man back and threw him over again, this time successfully. The Amir, after the style of the Mikado of dramatic fame, always tried to let the punishment fit the crime, although his punishments were sometimes such as to make one think that he greatly exaggerated the crime. For instance, a man who stole the food of some poor children, leaving them nothing, was put in a cage, in the bazar, and there starved; but to make the punishment fit his crime more closely, bread and water were brought to him two or three times each day, and placed just out of his reach, and this was continued until the man died of starvation. In another case, a man and a woman, who loved not wisely but too well, both being married people, determined on running away together, hoping thereby to secure their future happiness in each other’s society, but in their endeavour to reach India, where they intended living together, they were caught and brought back. The Amir, in ordering their punishment, said that, as the man was so fond of the woman, he should have her as completely as was possible. So the woman was thrown alive into a huge cauldron of boiling water, and boiled down to soup, and a basin of this soup was given to the man, who was forced to drink it, and after drinking it he was hanged. In this case the Amir’s object was to punish, not only in this life, but in the next, for a cannibal cannot enjoy the delights of Paradise as depicted in the Koran.