" Two days later the
expected courier arrives from the Boundary Commission Camp with a letter
saying: "It is useless for you to raise the question of coming to the
Commission Camp. In the first place, the Afghans would never allow you to
come here; and if you should happen to reach here, you would never be
able to get away again."
These two very encouraging missives from our own people seem at first
thought more heartless than even the "permission refused" of the
Russians. It occurs to me that this "you must not attempt to cross the
Afghan frontier" might just as easily have been told me at the Legation
at Teheran as when I had travelled six hundred miles to get to it; but
the ways of diplomacy are past the comprehension of ordinary mortals.
What, after all, are the ambitions and enterprises of an individual,
compared to the will and policy of an empire? No matter whether the
empire be semi-civilized and despotic, or free and enlightened, the
obscure and struggling individual is usually rated 0000.
Russia--"permission refused." England--paternally--"must
not attempt;" cold, offish language this for a lone cycler to be
confronted with away up here in the northeast corner of Persia, from
representatives of the two greatest empires of the world.
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