They are to take me through to the Khan of Grhalakua, the first
Afghan chieftain beyond the desert, and to take back to the Ameer a
receipt from him for my safe delivery.
It is a far easier task to reckon up their moral calibre than their
social. Before being in their delectable company an hour they reveal that
strange mingling of childlike simplicity and total moral depravity that
enters into the composition of semi-civilized kleptomaniacs. The khan is
a person of a highly sanguine temperament and possesses a headstrong
disposition; coupled with his perverted notions of meum and tuum, these
qualities will some fine day end in his being brought up with a round
turn and required to part company with his ears or nose, or to be turned
adrift on the cold charity of the world, deprived of his hands by the
crude and summary justice of Khorassan. His eyes are brown and large, and
spherical almost as an owl's eyes, and they bulge out in a manner that
exposes most of the white. He wears long hair, curled up after the manner
of Persian la-de-da-dom, and in his crude, uncivilized sphere evidently
fancies himself something of a dandy.
The mirza is quiet and undemonstrative in his manners, as compared with
his social superior; and as becomes a person gifted with the rare talent
of composing and writing letters, his bump of cautiousness is several
degrees larger than the khan's, but is, nevertheless, not large enough to
counterbalance the pernicious effect of an inherited and deeply rooted
yearning for filthy lucre and a lamentable indifference as to the manner
of obtaining it.
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