backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited in
front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back--if they
survive the journey--in the same way. It is painful even to think of
what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle
tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious
than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in the
ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit
swinging a stone or coloured glass ball, suspended by a string from a
tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine
male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered on
some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few
instances; but they may suffice to reveal a state of mental development
at which civilisation hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.

Their superstition exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a
numerous priesthood--"Mullahs," "Sahibzadas," "Akhundzadas," "Fakirs,"
--and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the
theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the
people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of "droit du seigneur," and no
man's wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and
morals it is impossible to write. As Macaulay has said of Wycherley's
plays, "they are protected against the critics as a skunk is protected
against the hunters." They are "safe, because they are too filthy to
handle, and too noisome even to approach."

Yet the life even of these barbarous people is not without moments when
the lover of the picturesque might sympathise with their hopes and
fears. In the cool of the evening, when the sun has sunk behind the
mountains of Afghanistan, and the valleys are filled with a delicious
twilight, the elders of the village lead the way to the chenar trees by