1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

7
A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
waste their land , carrying of their cattle and their sheep, and also
sometimes their girls and young boys as slaves, for Hazaras are
naturally hard-working and industrious, and being also strong and
active, they make excellent servants and even beasts of burden, and in
the towns, at any rate, are cheaper to feed than donkeys, go faster,
carrying almost as much, and do not need a man to drive them.
Poor, heavy, dull Hazara! But he is patient and industrious, and not
really devoid of intelligence, in spite of the subjection in which he is
held, so his da y ma y come yet, and then let his master beware, for he is
fierce, revengeful, and cruel, if he ever does strike, he will strike hard .
To the left of the Tower, and joined on to it, was a long low building
made also of mud. This was evidently a cattle-shed or stable, or
something of that sort, for it was open in front, and at the time at
which we are being introduced to it – about nine o’clock in the
morning – was occupied chiefly by cocks and hens, and a few pigeons
puffed out and prancing round in semi-circles, paying devoted court to
apparently indifferent mates who stalked contemptuously on, picking
up here a grain, there a scrap of bread , albeit casting a hurried
occasional glance back, just to see that their admirers were keeping up
unflagging attentions. In front lay a great sheep dog, rough, unkempt,
apparently asleep, but watchful.
At right angles to this shed, and opposite the tower, stretched a long
low building or row of buildings projecting nowhere more than twenty
or thirt y feet from the hill which protected them from the chill north
winds. One-storeyed buildings for the most part, but one at last, that
adjoining the shed had a sort of upper store y, closed on three sides by a
dead wall, but open on the third except where it was partially screened
in by a number of tall bulrushes. Be yond this and down the hill there
were other similar bu ildings – many of them in fact – but the mud was
less smoothly laid, and the ground in front of them less carefully
swept, and the y projected less be yond the protecting hill, so little, in
fact, that it was easy enough to see that their outer wall was a mere
frontage to the true dwelling, which was literally hollowed out of the
hillside and extended often two, sometimes three, rooms deep into its
very centre. Other dwellings had no wall in front at all, but were mere
caves, more like the habitations of wild beasts than of men.
Such then, in brief, was a Hazara village, consisting of some two
hundred houses or so, and the dwelling with the little scrap of what one
may call second storey was the residence of the Chief or Mir of one of
the most important sub-divisions of the Hazara tribe. Next to this
structure, and separated from it indeed but by a few yards, was another,
similar in all particulars except that it could boast of no upper
chamber. This was the residence of the chiefs cousin (his brother, he
called him, though he was his uncle’s, not his father’s son), who acted
as hiss assistant and adviser, his vizier, in fact, a man of rather unusual
qualities in that countr y, for he had ideas, ambitions, plans. Moreover,