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It appears, however, that Cavaignari to the last believed that the Ameer's authority would be sufficient to protect the little British force. On the night of the 2nd of September the Heratee troops attacked the Embassy. The party were lodged in a wooden building in the Bala Hissar.
And she, in her turn, though she knew his faults, though she not only bewailed them, but resented them, at times most fiercely, could not forget that he had been her nursling, could not forget, above all, that he was her dear brother Babar's son. Thus all went smoothly in the Bala Hissar, where young Prince Akbar, now close on three years old, looked and talked and acted like one of six.
On the afternoon of the 7th a violent explosion was heard in the Beni Hissar camp from the direction of the Sherpur cantonment north of Cabul, near the site of the British cantonments of 1839-41. Next morning information came in that the Sherpur magazine had been blown up, and that the cantonment had been abandoned by the Afghan regiments which had garrisoned that vast unfinished structure.
Arguing that a retreat on Jellalabad must be most disastrous, and was to be avoided except in the last extremity, he nevertheless ended somewhat inconsistently by leaving to the military authorities, if in eight or ten days there should appear no prospect of an improvement of the situation, the decision whether it would be wiser to attempt a retreat or to withdraw from the cantonments into the Balla Hissar.
From this, however, we diverged at Zara, in order to visit the city of Kara Hissar, and the neighboring Lidjissy mines, which had been pioneered by the Genoese explorers, and were now being worked by a party of Englishmen. This divergence on to unbeaten paths was made at a very inopportune season; for the rainy spell set in, which lasted, with scarcely any intermission, for over a fortnight.
In the Balla Hissar Shah Soojah had a considerable, if rather mixed, body of military and several guns. The rising of the 2d November may not have been the result of a fully organised plan.
By a jet of stones blown out through the Balla Hissar gate four Afghans were killed, and two sowars and an Afghan badly hurt. Captain Shafto's body and the remains of the Goorkhas were found later, and buried; and the determination was formed to have no more to do with the Balla Hissar, but to occupy the Sherpur cantonment.
Marching in the direction of the lateral spur extending from the main ridge eastward to Beni Hissar, Baker observed that large masses of the enemy were quitting the plain villages about Beni Hissar in which they had taken shelter for the night, and were hurrying to gain the summit of the spur which constituted the defensive position of the Afghan reserve. Baker's coup d'oeil was quick and true.
Weeks elapsed before the organisation of the force approached completion, and it was only by a desperate struggle that General Charles Gough's little brigade received by the end of September equipment sufficient to enable that officer to advance by short marches. Roberts was holding his durbar in the Balla Hissar of Cabul on the day that the head of Gough's advance reached Jellalabad.
The winters are severe, but the summers are very temperate seldom going above 80 degrees. Kabul is fortified without and within; being separated into quarters by stone walls: the Bala Hissar, or citadel proper, being on the east, while the Persian quarter of the city is strongly protected on the southwest. In the days of Sultan Baber, Kabul was the capital of the Mogul empire.
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