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Updated: June 22, 2025
The next morning Shere Ali travelled northwards and forty-eight hours later from the top of the Malakand Pass he saw winding across the Swat valley past Chakdara the road which reached to Kohara and there stopped. Violet Oliver travelled to India in the late autumn of that year, free from apprehension.
She heard Dick draw a breath of relief, and she went on quickly, as though she had been in doubt what she should say and now was sure. "The same night after he had asked me to marry him I packed them up and sent them to him." "He has them now, then?" asked Linforth. "I don't know. I sent them to Kohara. I did not know in what camp he was staying. I thought it likely he would go home at once."
He had shown it in his forecasts of the humiliation which would befall Shere Ali when he was brought back a prisoner to Kohara. Linforth, in a word, had shed what was left of his boyhood. He had come to recognise that life was never all black and all white. He tore up the letter into tiny fragments. It required no answer.
But both men knew, however unconcernedly they spoke, that Shere Ali's return was to be momentous in the history of Chiltistan. Shere Ali's father knew it too, that troubled man in the Palace above Kohara. "When did you reach Kohara?" Phillips asked. "I have not yet been to Kohara. I ride down from here this afternoon." Shere Ali smiled as he spoke, and the smile said more than the words.
That unobservant man had just written at length, privately and confidentially, both to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the hill-station and to the Resident at Kohara. And to both he had written to the one effect: "We must expect trouble in Chiltistan." He based his conclusions upon the glimpse which he had obtained into the troubled feelings of Shere Ali.
Ralston broke in upon him with a laugh. "Oh, man of one idea, in any case the Road will go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush. That's the price which Chiltistan must pay as security for future peace the military road through Kohara to the foot of the Hindu Kush." Linforth's face cleared, and he said cheerfully: "It's strange that Shere Ali doesn't realise that himself."
Two hours later Captain Phillips mounted on to the roof of his house and saw that the guards were no longer at their posts. Within a week the Khan was back in his Palace, the smoke rose once more above the roof-tops of Kohara, and a smiling shikari presented himself before Poulteney Sahib in the grounds of the Residency.
"No doubt all you learnt and saw there will be extremely valuable. "And the road?" asked Shere Ali. "It is not proposed to carry on the road. The merchants in Kohara think that by bringing more trade, their profits would become less, while the country people look upon it as a deliberate attack upon their independence. The Government has no desire to force it upon the people against their wish."
Ralston so far away as Peshawur saw it reddening the sky and was the more troubled in that he could not discover why just at this moment the menace should glow red. The son of Abdulla Mohammed was apparently quiet and Shere Ali had not left Calcutta. The Resident at Kohara admitted the danger. Every despatch he sent to Peshawur pointed to the likelihood of trouble. But he too was at fault.
Even at that moment when his life was in the balance his thoughts would play with it, so complete a piece of artistry it seemed. There was the tomb itself an earth grave and a rough obelisk without so much as a name or a date upon it set up at its head by some past Resident at Kohara.
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