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Updated: October 26, 2025
After a short stay at Kelat, the two travellers, who still passed as horse-dealers, resolved to continue their journey, but instead of following the high road to Kandahar, they crossed a dreary and barren country, ill-populated, watered by the Caisser, a river which dries up during the summer; and they reached a little town, called Noschky or Nouchky, on the frontier of Afghanistan.
But Kim did not suspect that Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab, a wealthy and enterprising trader, whose caravans penetrated far and far into the Back of Beyond, was registered in one of the locked books of the Indian Survey Department as C25 IB. Twice or thrice yearly C25 would send in a little story, baldly told but most interesting, and generally it was checked by the statements of R17 and M4 quite true.
Amongst them were many well-grown men, some with rings in their ears horse-dealers from Piedmont, we were told; but the greater number were little, dark, thin, and poorly-fed peasants. Some of them, dark-eyed and tawny-skinned, looked like Arabs, possibly descendants of the Saracens who once occupied the province.
The horse was now plunging as if Juno had sent her gadfly to him; and Philip, interested and excited, came nearer and nearer, till he stood by the side of the horse-dealers.
They had a fine travelling waggon drawn up on some waste ground near at hand; they had also pitched three or four beehive huts, made of bent poles, covered with sacks. They were horse-dealers and basket-makers, as one could see from the drove of lean horses and heap of wicker-work near the waggon. Several children were playing about among the huts.
The rest he would despatch to London, where he knew plenty of horse-dealers; and he doubted not that they would fetch him as much as ten pounds apiece all round, being now in great demand. I told him I wished that he might get it; but as it proved afterwards, he did.
They informed the authorities, who sent soldiers, who lay in ambush behind the sand-hills until the crowd of horse-dealers and lookers-on, whom we did not suspect of treachery, surrounded and seized us. My master was more cruelly tied than we two servants. We were taken to the Raja, who accused me of having brought my master into the country.
The Captain stuffed me with cakes and undiluted wine. He told me of numberless injustices to which he had been a victim. He complained particularly of the Bourbons; and as he neglected to tell me who the Bourbons were, I got the idea I can't tell how that the Bourbons were horse-dealers established at Waterloo.
Someone had told me that, the glory of Covent Garden Ball had departed. It may be so. Yet the floor, with its strange conglomeration of music-hall artists, callow university men, shady horse-dealers, and raucous military infants, had an atmosphere of more than meretricious gaiety. The close of an old year and the birth of a new one touch the toughest.
'Yours very sincerely, To which Mr. Sponge shortly after rejoined as follows: 'BANTAM HOTEL, BOND STREET. 'Yours to hand I am glad to receive a disclaimer of any unworthy imputations respecting the brown horse. Such insinuations are only for horse-dealers, not for men of high gentlemanly feeling. 'I am sorry to say we have not got out of the horse as I hoped.
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