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Updated: June 16, 2025
The dragon, however, is in China the symbol of the Sovereign and Sage, a use of it unknown in Buddhism, according to which all nagas need to be converted in order to obtain a higher phase of being. In Chinese Na-k'eeh, an ancient kingdom and city on the southern bank of the Cabul river, about thirty miles west of Jellalabad. We would seem now to be in 403.
The plain of Jellalabad and of Nagpore, stud the valley of Cabul are literally strewn with these monuments. Major Biddulph, when he ascended the valleys of the Hindoo Koosh Mountains, was astonished to see on every side megalithic monuments resembling those of his own country, and, like them, the work of an unknown race.
The British in Cabul were hemmed in by their enemies, the cantonments or barracks were deserted, and the sixteen thousand fugitives had been surrounded outside the city by Afghan troops led by the son of the Dost Mohammed. These things gave the defenders of Jellalabad enough to think of, and to fear.
During the temporary absence of Cotton, who accompanied Keane, Nott had the command at Candahar, Sale at and about Cabul, and the troops were quartered in those capitals, and in Jellalabad, Ghuznee, Charikar and Bamian. The Shah and the Envoy wintered in the milder climate of Jellalabad, and Burnes was in political charge of the capital and its vicinity.
Regardless of a heavy artillery fire they stood their ground, and so galled Pollock's troops with sharp discharges from their jezails that it became necessary to send infantry against them. They were dislodged from the mountain they had occupied by a portion of the Jellalabad brigade, led by gallant old General Sale, who had his usual luck in the shape of a wound.
Those communications in a measure prepared the people in Jellalabad for disaster, but not for the awful catastrophe of which Dr Brydon had to tell, when in the afternoon of the 13th the lone man, whose approach to the fortress Lady Butler's painting so pathetically depicts, rode through the Cabul gate of Jellalabad. Dr Brydon was covered with cuts and contusions, and was utterly exhausted.
Meanwhile, when the news reached India that a British army had been destroyed in Afghanistan, and that General Sale, with another, was closely besieged in Jellalabad, a strong force was despatched under General Pollock to his relief.
The implied imputation on the good faith of British officers might well have stung to indignation the meekest; but the council's opinion was taken as to the expediency of complying with the derogatory request made by the Shah, as well as of a stipulation a modification of what Broadfoot had originally urged in vain for the surrender of all prisoners, hostages, sick, and wounded under detention in Afghanistan, on the arrival at Peshawur of the Jellalabad brigade.
It may be assumed that this intimation weakened in some degree the General's expressed resolution to hold Jellalabad with determination, and it is not to be denied that this resolution was in a measure conditional on the not unwarranted expectation of early relief.
They were able to obtain money from the Cabul usurers, and thus to supply themselves with suitable clothing and additions to their rations, and their mails from India and Jellalabad were forwarded to them without hindrance. The summer months were passed in captivity, but it was no longer for them a captivity of squalor and wretchedness.
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