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292 scenery appropriate to its history. It was not as striking, in the landscape way, as the Nankow Pass by the Great Wall of China. At every little upgrade my pony balked until the sais got down and led him by out-stretched bridle to the top of the hill. When I demurred at myself dismounting to walk up the next trifling hill, the gentle sais whined: "Gentlemen go Khyber Pass always walk up hills." The sowar lounged in splendid ease on the back seat of his tum-tum, dawdling his Enfield on his knee, and watching us from on high as we toiled up each gentle gradient after him.

"How about that sowar? If gentlemen always walk up hills in Khyber Pass, why does n't he get down and walk?"

"Oh! Sowar no gentleman,"said the naïve one. But at the next hill a disgusted Khyberi, no gentleman that he was, dismounted and walked too.

At last Ali Majid's battlemented towers, crowning a pyramidal hill at the middle of the pass, came in range, most picturesque of many great fortresses of India, completing the wild landscape which, in turn, it commands. There the pass is narrowest, only fifteen yards from wall to wall, and a steep zigzag path leads up to the deep gateway of the old Afghan stronghold. From that aery there is a bird's-eye view down the narrow defile. The history of this Gibraltar is an unbroken record of attack, siege, defense, and slaughter—last captured, recaptured, and burned in 1897. Beyond Ali Masjid we might not go, and we could only look up the narrow rock corridor, soon closed to view by a jut-