The Broken Road | Page 2

kindly stop
it!" the merchant would say; and Linforth would then proceed to
demonstrate how extremely valuable to the people of Chiltistan a better
road would be:
"Kohara is already a great mart. In your bazaars at summer-time you
see traders from Turkestan and Tibet and Siberia, mingling with the
Hindoo merchants from Delhi and Lahore. The road will bring you still
more trade."
The spokesman went back to the broad street of Kohara seemingly well
content, and inch by inch the road crept nearer to the capital.
But Luffe was better acquainted with the Chiltis, a soft-spoken race of
men, with musical, smooth voices and polite and pretty ways. But
treachery was a point of honour with them and cold-blooded cruelty a
habit. There was one particular story which Luffe was accustomed to
tell as illustrative of the Chilti character.
"There was a young man who lived with his mother in a little hamlet
close to Kohara. His mother continually urged him to marry, but for a
long while he would not. He did not wish to marry. Finally, however,
he fell in love with a pretty girl, made her his wife, and brought her

home, to his mother's delight. But the mother's delight lasted for just
five days. She began to complain, she began to quarrel; the young wife
replied, and the din of their voices greatly distressed the young man,
besides making him an object of ridicule to his neighbours. One
evening, in a fit of passion, both women said they would stand it no
longer. They ran out of the house and up the hillside, but as there was
only one path they ran away together, quarrelling as they went. Then
the young Chilti rose, followed them, caught them up, tied them in turn
hand and foot, laid them side by side on a slab of stone, and quietly cut
their throats.
"'Women talk too much,' he said, as he came back to a house
unfamiliarly quiet. 'One had really to put a stop to it.'"
Knowing this and many similar stories, Luffe had been for some while
on the alert. Whispers reached him of dangerous talk in the bazaars of
Kohara, Peshawur, and even of Benares in India proper. He heard of
the growing power of the old Mullah by the river-bank. He was aware
of the accusations against the ruling Khan. He knew that after night had
fallen Wafadar Nazim, the Khan's uncle, a restless, ambitious, disloyal
man, crept down to the river-bank and held converse with the priest.
Thus he was ready so far as he could be ready.
The news that the road was broken was flashed to him from the nearest
telegraph station, and within twenty-four hours he led out a small force
from his Agency--a battalion of Sikhs, a couple of companies of
Gurkhas, two guns of a mountain battery, and a troop of irregular
levies--and disappeared over the pass, now deep in snow.
"Would he be in time?"
Not only in India was the question asked. It was asked in England, too,
in the clubs of Pall Mall, but nowhere with so passionate an outcry as
in the house at the foot of the Sussex Downs.
To Sybil Linforth these days were a time of intolerable suspense. The
horror of the Road was upon her. She dreamed of it when she slept, so
that she came to dread sleep, and tried, as long as she might, to keep

her heavy eyelids from closing over her eyes. The nights to her were
terrible. Now it was she, with her child in her arms, who walked for
ever and ever along that road, toiling through snow or over shale and
finding no rest anywhere. Now it was her boy alone, who wandered
along one of the wooden galleries high up above the river torrent, until
a plank broke and he fell through with a piteous scream. Now it was her
husband, who could go neither forward nor backward, since in front
and behind a chasm gaped. But most often it was a man--a young
Englishman, who pursued a young Indian along that road into the mists.
Somehow, perhaps because it was inexplicable, perhaps because its
details were so clear, this dream terrified her more than all the rest. She
could tell the very dress of the Indian who fled--a young man--young as
his pursuer. A thick sheepskin coat swung aside as he ran and gave her
a glimpse of gay silk; soft leather boots protected his feet; and upon his
face there was a look of fury and wild fear. She never woke from this
dream but her heart was beating wildly. For a few moments after
waking peace would descend upon her.
"It is a dream--all a dream," she would whisper to