Chapter VII: The Fugitive

Ignorant that Taimur, the Usbeg Tartar, the Guide soldier, was preceding him, Robert Wodrow--full of longing for dire and terrible vengeance on those who had destroyed his comrades and friends, among them more especially Leslie Colville, as he never doubted--trod resolutely on to reach Lundi-Khana Kotal, or any outpost at the head of the Kurram Valley.

From the circumstance of Robert Wodrow being a gentleman by birth and education, and that both had loved two sisters, there had been a bond of friendship between the staff-captain and the luckless private of hussars.

They were Europeans--another tie; and more than all, when so far away from all who loved them, they were 'brother Scots.'

Hungry and athirst--though the latter suffering could be appeased at any passing stream--the evening of the day after the massacre, when Wodrow finally turned his back upon the smoking ruins of the Residency, saw him disguised and armed as we have described, resolutely pursuing the mountain-path which led, he knew, from Cabul, past Buthak towards the Lataband Pass, a distance of twenty-two miles; but, disguised though he was, he felt that it was necessary for his safety to avoid all towns and villages, among which, no doubt, news of the destruction of the Feringhees must have spread like wildfire.

He found himself in a solitude--a place of the most intense loneliness, so he paused to rest himself awhile beside a runnel that trickled down the rocks, and to gather a few wild apples and grapes. On one side rose the Katcha mountains to the height of eight thousand feet; on the other were mountains quite as lofty. It was such a scene and place as would require the pencil of Salvator Rosa to depict, so deep were the shadows in the dark and savage passes, so red the light that glowed on the eastern slopes of the mighty hills as the sun veered westward.

Vast groves of jelgoozeh pines, black and solemn, cast a gloom in some places; in others the sturdy, snake-like roots of the banyan-tree curled and twisted themselves among the rocks, and through the holes and crevices of a little ruined musjid, or wayside house of prayer, built of red and white marble, which was open and empty.

Wodrow looked at it wistfully, as if he would select it as a place wherein to pass the night and escape the mountain dews; but he thought of the snakes he had seen, and scorpions too, and remembered, with a shudder, the huge and venomous reptiles of that kind he had seen on the plains of Peshawur.

He selected a crevice in the rocks where a quantity of dry and dead leaves had been drifted by the wind, put his Afghan shield and tulwar under his head as a pillow, muffled his furred choga around him, and, soldier-like, accustomed to sleep anywhere, anyhow, or at any time, he slept till morning was well in, so much had he been overcome by the weariness of the preceding twenty-four hours.

Another ten miles would bring him, he knew, to Jugdulluk--that place of evil omen and blood--towards which the lonely fugitive trod on through black and frowning gorges, where fantastic rocks, savage and weird, flung grey and purple shadows that made the deeper passes dark as midnight, and there the waters of the mountains could be seen reflecting the sky above, as they rolled through the obscurity so far down below.

In some parts the mountains rose the perfection of naked desolation, appalling in their silence and sublimity, looking like the scene of some Titanic conflict in ages unknown, and yet every foot of the way there had been traced in British blood--the blood of Elphinstone's massacred army in the war of 1841.

At one point, as Robert Wodrow was proceeding along a narrow ledge above a giddy precipice, where the mists of a foaming torrent streamed upward from the deep dark chasm below, he had a narrow escape, at the thought of which his blood ran cold.

At one place, treading over a loose spot, the earth and splintered rock gave way beneath his feet, and before he could recover himself he fell upon a lower ledge, some fifteen feet beneath, where he lay for a time, half stunned and scarcely daring to breathe.

At that moment death seemed close indeed!

He was only five yards from the edge of a precipice, the height of which his mind failed to fathom, and, as one in a dreadful dream, he crawled upward and away from it on his hands and knees, till a surer and less perilous route--path it could not be called--was won, and he resumed his way with a prayer of thankfulness on his lips and in his heart--one of the prayers he had learned as a child at his mother's knee in the old manse of Kirktoun-Mailler.

His anxiety and disquietude were increased now by hearing more than once amid these profound solitudes the moaning yell of a hyæna, responded to by that other peculiar sound which seems to be something between the wail of a child and the howl of a dog--the cry of the jackal; thus, the peril of hostile men apart, he was not sorry when he came suddenly upon a species of village in a hollow of the hills--we say a species of village, as it did not consist of built houses, but only some seven or eight huts.

The dwellings, poor and mean, were formed of stakes cut from the adjacent forest, with walls formed of wicker-work plastered with mud, and called 'wattle and dab;' leaves of trees and jungle grass formed the roof, and all around them was jungle tainting the air, and to the European very suggestive of fever and miasma.

The inhabitants were rude and simple shepherds, whose _doombas_, or fat-tailed Persian sheep, were grazing in the neighbouring valley, and they seemed somewhat awed by the gaunt, tall, and keen-eyed warrior, who, with shield and tulwar, pistols and dagger, his floating loongee and cloak, alike stained with what was too evidently blood, suddenly appeared among them and asked for food, offering for it a handful of _kusiras_, or Afghan pence.

From them he got milk, chupattees, and a _cuddoo_, or gourd full of curry and rice, of which he ate like a famished kite, while the wondering shepherds looked on without questioning, and evidently impressed by the swagger and adopted ferocity of his bearing, believing he could be no other than 'a very devil of a _budmash_' (or swashbuckler) steeped in the blood of the Feringhees.

Refreshed now, he resolved to lose no time in pushing on, saying that he was going to Tezeen, which was not the case, as it lay some miles on his right, but pursued the path towards the Suffaidh Sang, and was warned at parting to beware of a certain place, marked by some ruined walls, which were the abode of the Ghoule Biaban.

Had these shepherds penetrated his disguise or doubted him? He almost feared so, as he saw a little group of them, clad in their loose blouses and conical caps of black fur, conferring together and watching him as he disappeared over a _kotal_, a place where the road dipped down.

Sunset and falling darkness--after which it was perilous to travel in such localities--found him at the ruined walls referred to as the abode of the Ghoule, and there in a little clump of wild pistachio trees he took up his quarters for the night, rightly supposing that all natives would sedulously shun a place haunted by such a dreadful demon as the Ghoule Biaban, or Spirit of the Waste--a gigantic and hideous spectre, with a red tail and claws like a _syces_ sickle, who is supposed to haunt all lonely places in Afghanistan and devour any passenger whose evil fortune casts him in his way.

No ghoule came to Robert Wodrow in his sleep, but a delightful dream, which made him long remember the pistachio tope amid the lonely waste--a dream of Ellinor Wellwood!

So powerful, so vivid, was this dream that he almost said to himself was it in sleep she came before him?

He dreamed that she was beside him and imploring his forgiveness, took his hands in her own, and pressed her lips passionately to them. Then her cheek seemed to touch his, and he could feel her soft sweet breath, and her dear eyes looked tenderly into his.

So vivid was that dream that he turned his head on the root of the tree against which it rested, towards the vision, if we may use the term, and then, of course, it vanished, and the light of the African sun streamed between the branches into his eyes.

Robert Wodrow's heart beat hopefully and happily; he felt that he had looked into the face of his other soul, with the assurance that they would one day meet again; and that notwithstanding their separation, and all that had come to pass, they were--perhaps--kindred spirits after all; and that phrase has a deeper signification than most people think. 'It is my solemn belief,' says a recent writer, 'that spirits are wedded before their birth into this world, and that somewhere, perhaps separated by barriers of space and circumstances, there exists for every soul its fellow, its complement, whose imperfections joined to that other's, will make a perfect whole, if only men and women would not so rashly take the counterfeit for the real.'

So Robert Wodrow flattered himself that Ellinor, perhaps in a dream of her own, had somehow come to him in the spirit, a wild and mystic idea; but, as he examined his arms and ammunition before again resuming his journey, he found that there had been perilously near him in the night something as bad, if not worse, than the Ghoule Biaban!

Amid the sandy mud of a runnel that ran not far from the ruined walls there were distinctly traceable the prints of tigers' feet, quite fresh, like the paw-marks of a gigantic cat; so on this night, when he thought that by the influence of superstition he was unusually safe, he had been in more than usual peril!

A few miles more would bring him to Gundamuck, a walled village, twenty-eight miles west of Jellalabad, surrounded by luxuriant wheat-fields and tall groves of sombre cypresses--the place where Yakoub Khan and the ill-fated Cavagnari had signed that treaty of peace which the former had so basely violated; but Gundamuck was a place to be avoided by the fugitive, who kept among the mountains above it, thus having to ford more than one tributary of the Surkh-ab river, and while sighing to think he had still nearly seventy miles to travel on foot before he would hear the sound of a British bugle, he struck manfully into paths which presented themselves here and there, but seemed to be only marked by the tread of beasts of prey.

Among rocky mountains, divested of all verdure and green clothing, his way lay now for miles, and, if the utter loneliness of the scenes ensured safety, it was at times not the less impressive and appalling to the solitary man, and made him think,

'The silent gloom around hath power
To banish aught of gladness;
The good with awful dreams to thrill,
The guilty--drive to madness!'