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They are to take me through to the Khan of Grhalakua, the first Afghan chieftain beyond the desert, and to take back to the Ameer a receipt from him for my safe delivery. It is a far easier task to reckon up their moral calibre than their social.
After the acquisition of Quetta by the English, he began to side with the Russians. Roberts, who took Cabul, and installed as ameer Abdurrahman Khan . The English then decided to evacuate the territory. On their march they were attacked by Ayub Khan of Herat. Later he was defeated by Roberts, and driven back to that place.
The female relatives of the abdicated Ameer fomented the rising by appeals to popular sympathy, and by the more practical argument of lavish distribution of treasure. The flame spread, tribesmen and disbanded soldiers sprang to arms, the banner of the Prophet was unfurled, and the nation heaved with the impulse of fanaticism.
Of course some said that the difference of opinion on religious matters was the cause, while others alleged a political reason, saying that Colonel Gordon was opposed to the treatment of Yakoob Khan, the late Ameer of Afghanistan.
"Tell them I am going down to Beerjand to consult with Heshmet-i-Molk, the Ameer of Seistan, and see if it is possible to get through to Quetta via Beerjand." "Ever hear of Dadur?" queries Mr. Gray. "Ever hear of Dadur, the place of which the Persians tritely say: 'Seeing that there is Dadur, why did Allah, then, make the infernal regions? That is somewhere in Beloochistan.
Parliament was not sitting but it was difficult even by opinion out of doors strongly to protest against military measures taken in a case where the authority of the Crown had been insulted, and outrage committed upon it by the Ameer of Afghanistan. That intelligence was sent. We were never undeceived about it until we were completely committed to the war, and until our troops were in the country.
These signal services of British diplomacy counted for little at Cabul in comparison with the question of the dynastic guarantee which we persistently withheld. In the spring of 1873, when matters relating to the Afghan-Persian frontier had to be adjusted, the Ameer sent his Prime Minister to Simla with the intention of using every diplomatic means for the extortion of that long-delayed boon.
The streams of refugees from Sovietized Turkestan that flowed across his borders for protection, headed by his kinsman the Ameer of Bokhara, made Amanullah Khan do some hard thinking, intensified by a serious mutiny of Afghan troops on the Russian border, the mutineers demanding the right to form Soldiers' Councils quite on the Russian pattern.
Lord Lytton's instructions directed him to despatch without delay a mission to Cabul, whose errand would be to require of the Ameer the acceptance of a permanent Resident and free access to the frontier positions of Afghanistan on the part of British officers, who should have opportunity of conferring with the Ameer on matters of common interest with 'becoming attention to their friendly councils. Those were demands notoriously obnoxious to the Afghan monarch and the Afghan people.
It is related by an historian that there was an ameer of the land of Egypt, whose mind being one night unusually disturbed, he sent for one of his courtiers, a convivial companion, and said to him, "To-night my bosom, from what cause I know not, is uncommonly restless, and I wish thee to divert me by some amusing narrative."
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