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The direct route into Kashmir by Murree is impassable, the snow being still deep owing to a very late spring following a severe winter. This will oblige us to go round by Abbotabad, so I wired to my friend General Woon to warn him that we propose to invade his peaceful home. Sunday, March 26.
Anyhow, he hoped to quiet all local disturbances, and he would undertake to see that every station on the line was warned. He would receive reinforcements from Abbotabad by the afternoon of the next day; if Bardur and Gilgit, or Yasin as it might be, could delay the attack till then everything might be safe unless, indeed, the whole nexus of hill-tribes rose as one man.
The terminus at Boonji was held by a certain Jackson, a wise man who inspired terror in a mixed force of irregulars, Afridis, Pathans, Punjabis, Swats, and a dozen other varieties of tribesmen. To him he sent the most lengthy and urgent messages, for he held the key of a great telegraphic system with which he might awake Abbotabad and the Punjab.
This delayed for some time the sending of a freight-train to Abbotabad, but by and by substitutes were found, and the works left under guard. The telegram to Peshawur found things in readiness there, for memories of old trouble still linger, and people sleep lightly on that frontier. Word came of native riots in the south, at Lahore and Amritsar, and the line of towns which mark the way to Delhi.
Similar hybrid names have been created by the English in India, mostly on the North-west Frontier, where alone they have planted new inhabited sites Lyallpur, Abbotabad, Edwardesabad, Robertsganj, and the like. But these are almost all small places or forts, and their names represent no policy of Anglicization.
Our last recollection of Pindi was a vision of the faithful Ayata, paid, tipped, and provided with a flaming "chit," flapping along the road in the bright moonlight, with all his worldly possessions, en route for Abbotabad and home. Saturday, October 14.
The ekka horses, too, had brought our heavy luggage all the way from Abbotabad over a shocking road in the most admirable manner, and we had every reason to congratulate ourselves on having entrusted the arrangement of the whole business the "bandobast" in native parlance to our henchman Sabz Ali, who had thus proved himself an energetic and trustworthy organiser, and saving financier to the extent of some twenty rupees.
Some time before leaving England I had written to my old friend General Woon, commanding the troops at Abbotabad, asking him to provide me with a servant capable of dry-nursing a pair of Babes in the Wood throughout their sojourn in a strange land.
So, on Tuesday, we sent on the heavy luggage in two ekkas which Sabz Ali had procured, the two others being only hired from Hassan Abdal to Abbotabad. So, acting on my permission, he engaged one Ayata a gentle person of a sheep-like disposition, who did everything he was told, and nothing that he was told not to, during our sojourn in Kashmir.
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