1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

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A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
“Come out of that, mad woman,” old Sardaro would call. “Come down
from there at once. Did ever any one hear of such insanit y? Actually
provoking the God above to strike you dead with His lightning, sitting
in the storm there when even the ver y beasts have had sense to seek
shelter. And who is going to nurse you when you are ill, think you?”
she would go on peevishly, not understanding in the least w herein the
attraction lay.
And then Gul Begum would come down softly, and change her
wringing garments for dry ones, and sit by the nurser y window, and
watch what she could see of the storm that attracted her so from there.
And she found a little sympathiser. Her little mistress, a perfect baby,
hardly able to toddle in the heavy shoes that she was made to wear,
would come and land herself on the slave girl’s knee all of a heap, and
sit by the window and watch too.
“That was a big one,” she would say, and hide her face for a moment
from the dazzling glare, on her companion’s breast. “Tell me about the
lightning, Gul Begum. What makes it come? and where does it come
from?” the child would ask. ‘Hark!’ as the thunder rolled close over
where they sat, almost, it seemed, above their ver y heads.
“It comes from the clouds,” Gul Begum replied, not knowing what to
answer. “And what are the clouds, Jan? Ah, listen to me,” the baby lips
would sa y, seeing that the girl was only half attending to what she was
saying, and was gazing far away into space. “Tell me, Gul Begum,
what are the clouds, and how can they make all that noise? You must
know, because you are always watching them.”
“We must ask Agha, I think, darling, I do not know,” was all the girl
could say. “It always seems to me as though they must be charged with
powder like the gu ns, and that when they touch the mountain tops, they
burst just as a gun might do, and send forth the flash and the roar just
like a gun, but I do not really know, that is only what I fanc y.”
There was another moment of keen joy to Gul Begum in her slavery. It
was just before the sun rose on the horizon, when there was the first
weird glimpse of day – when the cold, pale bluish green streak first
made its appearance far awa y in the Eastern sky, and, gradually
warming and warming, spread further and further up into the heavens,
telling that a new day was receiving its birth. Gul Begum knew nothing
about colour, nothing of artistic effects – at last, nothing that could be
defined. She had never seen or heard of a picture, but that was the hour
she preferred to all others in the day or night. It was the time when she
thought of her father and longed to be with him; the time when pure
thoughts and a sense of duties to be accomplished ungrudgingly, came
over her, and something more than that, too – a new feeling to which
she could have given no expression. Something that was an instinct
born of the curious circumstances under which she was placed, but