Note 180 — Chapter III

Captain Johnson’s Journal. The writer adds: “At the commencement of the defile, and for some considerable distance, passed two or three hundreds of our poor miserable Hindostanees, who had escaped up this unfrequented road from the massacre of the 12th. They had not a rag to cover them, and were all more or less frost-bitten, wounded, or starving. The poor wretches were huddled together in thirties and forties, so as to impart to each other a little animal heat, as other warmth was denied them by the barren, inhospitable wilderness around them. We afterwards learnt that scarcely one of these poor wretches escaped from the defile in which they had taken shelter; and that, driven to the extremes of hunger, some of them had for a few short hours sustained life by feeding on their dead comrades. The wind was blowing bitterly cold at our bivouac. No shelter of any kind for the ladies of our party during the whole night. Happiness is comparative; and truly fortunate did General Elphinstone, Brigadier Shelton, and myself consider ourselves when one of our Afghan attendants told us to accompany him inside a miserable cow-shed, which on our first entrance was so blackened with the dense smoke from a good blazing fire in the centre of the hut, that we could see none of the objects around us, until we had stretched ourselves at length on the floor, and consequently out of the influence of the smoke, when we perceived our companions to be three or four half-starved Hindostanees, who had accompanied our party. Our attendant wished to eject them; but we too truly sympathised with their sufferings to permit such an act of tyranny. We shortly afterwards got an invitation from Mahomed Akbar to join him and his party to dinner inside the fort. The room of our reception was not much better than that we had left. We had, however, a capital dinner, some cups of good tea, and a luxurious rest for the night, the room having been heated with a good blazing fire and lots of smoke, with no outlet for either, except the door and a small hole in the roof.”—[MS.]