one is the very outside superiority that could be required to force it, and one would be disposed to guess the needful difference at even less than that.

But one looks at it with altered eyes when one thinks of all it means to India, when one reflects that among these rocks, perhaps, may be the burial-place of our fame, that here the fatal challenge may be made to our greatness as a of her sons in vain.

World Power, and the best

be sacrificed, because in the hour of her prosperity England would not consider the years to come.

CHAPTER X

THE GREAT MANŒUVRES

WE lunched at Landi Kotal; Afghanistan before us. Thence back through the stifling dust-pestered pass, facing east once more after our long westering, to dine at Peshawar and take up again our train journey. It was to carry us as far as Kala ki Serai, where, while the sky was still dark with stars, we were dragged from our slumbers, to be told of Armies bearing down upon us and about to meet at dawn; for it was to the country between Hasan Abdal and Rawal Pindi that the manoeuvres had been transferred, which, planned to take place at Delhi, had to be abandoned there for want of water. It has seemed inconceivable in the past four days, during which we have been with the troops, that any place could be drier than Kala ki Serai. It would be impossible to give an idea of the dust to those who can only think of it in terms of an island climate. It has been suffocating, insufferable, pestiferous, amazing, and exquisite. Every movement of troops has been betrayed by it, every movement shrouded. Cavalry became at once invisible when moving at the trot; at a walk often

all that was left above the yellow clouds was the sparkle of their lances. Across the great flat plain, bounded by granite hills and snow-capped mountains, and scarred with dongas forty feet deep, strangely sinister and incredibly intricate, the dust, gray, gamboge, and black, fuming upwards from a hundred places, told, so far as a spectator could hope to see it, everything that was going on. To move nearer was to be involved in the fog yourself and to see nothing but the dim figures in front of you. It was dust so fine that it seemed to explode in smoke under the horses' feet, and so light that, once lifted, it floated in the air for hours. The men who marched through it were altered almost beyond recognition. Their eyebrows and lashes, hair, beards, and moustaches were clogged and gray; yellow drifts lay above their cheek-bones and changed the outline of their ears. The dust had caked on the hot dark faces till even the Moplahs and Multanis looked Eurasian.

Sikh, Gurkha, and Pathan were all of one colour, a smeared yellow-brown; even the crimson and scarlet, orange, green, and blue of lungi and cummerbund lost under a gray veil all sharpness of distinction. Looking at the queerly altered faces, altered so strikingly as to suggest a "makeup," one tried in vain to remember any picture of battle in these plains or others which had rendered the effect.

Towards evening the dust raised by the