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146 thoroughly with far lighter risk. In this and two or three smaller forts a large store of grain was found, but, owing to the lateness of the hour, little more than half of it could be secured.

To Macnaghten also it was owing that Shelton on the 13th was enabled to dislodge a strong body of insurgents, posted with two guns on the western heights near the village of Bemárú. Delayed for some hours by Elphinstone's dawdling and Shelton's perverseness, the advance began after 3 p.m. After some sharp fighting, in which friend and foe got mixed together, and the Afghán horse charged through and through our infantry, the enemy fled, losing both their guns.

That sunset gleam of transient success ushered in a long night of disaster and despair. Thenceforth nothing prospered with the doomed force cantoned in the Kábul valley. The Envoy kept on hoping, counselling, scheming by means of bribes to sow dissension among the insurgent leaders. By the middle of November Sale, instead of returning, as he might then have done, to Kábul, had marched on to Jalálábád. His reasons for a stop which, in Durand's opinion, was the worst he could have taken, did more credit to the prudence of the commander than to the generous instincts of the man. The question, however, bristled with difficulties, and Sale may have underrated the imbecility which reigned at Kábul. The next blow to the Envoy's hopes came from the side of Kandahár.