Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/14

 passed through the bazaar; the stony, cruel North had sent Bokharan chief, Khivan noble, and Turkoman grandee; while, from the South, Sir Craven Elphinstone, C.B., G.C.S.I, deputy resident at the court of Kashmere, slightly self-conscious, slightly nostalgic amidst the thousands of Asiatics, had crossed the Himalayas to tender the condolences of the Raj, the British-Indian government.

Everybody was there, except the late king's only child, the Princess Aziza Nurmahal who, according to the ancient custom, was sitting alone in the tower room of the palace harem, mumbling endless prayers and clicking off the ninety-nine holy names of Allah on her amber rosary; and the Ameer's best, oldest friend and prime minister, Hajji Akhbar Khan, on whom, a year before his death, he had conferred the honorable title of Itizad el-Dowleh—“Grandeur of the State.”

The cortège passed on, out to the willow fringed banks of the Ghulan River that lay across the mauve and rose mosaic of the town like a ribbon of watered silk.

River of grim tragedies!

River of sinister reputations; so sinister that there was not a Tamerlani who ever, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass his lips!

River which, for centuries, had been the grave of the thousands of Tamerlanis and raiding Afghans massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, disgraced courtiers, vanquished