food-grains in our frontier villages. The "close border" system was a bar to reciprocation. Did any of our villagers venture one step beyond the border, he went at his own risk. Were he killed or maimed, there was no redress. His murderer might enter British territory the day after and swagger before his victim's door, yet none dare touch him. Did an official cross the border, he ran the risk of dismissal – the certainty of displeasure. Such a system rather intensifies than mitigates the savagery and exclusiveness of our independent trans-border tribes. Cautiously relaxed, the Englishman might have been by this time as respected in the Shirani or Mahsud Mils as was the Roman citizen wherever he went within the bounds of his many-peopled empire.
Since annexation, only on two occasions had the Shirani hills been visited by British officers. Once, in 1853, troops had entered and burnt some of their villages as an act of reprisal; and again, in 1878, my predecessor had made an attempt to reach the Takht, as narrated some paragraphs back, and being fired at had withdrawn. With such a retrospect, the prospects of the expedition – excursion, I mean – seemed: hopeless. It was certain that Government would veto any proposal which might be made on any terms except those of the consent of the tribe to the visit, and the surrendering of hostages for good behaviour. To expect independent Afghans to invite British officers to march through their hills and visit their holiest shrine, was to hope for impossibilities. However, where there is a will there is a way. To win Afghans it is first necessary to make them suffer, in which case they fear you and after that to show them silver, in which case they will serve you.
Now it so happened that at the time the Shiranis richly merited punishment for past misdeeds. One of their smaller clans, named Khyderzais, or Sons of Khyder, had from time immemorial made their living by plundering others, and occasionally, amongst the others, villagers in British territory nearest their hills. The practice of the district in such case had been to apply the lex talionis, but in an indirect way. Whenever the Khyderzais harried cattle, the district officer quietly retaliated by seizing and retaining the next Shirani caravan which came into British territory, no matter to what section of the tribe it belonged. After seizure, the tribe would be notified that if the account was not settled by a given date, their property in our hands would be sold and our villagers compensated. Sometimes another procedure would be followed. Instead of property, relations or more distant fellow-clansmen of the actual offenders would be seized and imprisoned. Both methods are unknown in Europe, and officially somewhat irregular in India. But both are effective, recognised by all hillmen as justifiable, practised by themselves, and generally bring about the settlement of frontier cases speedily, and above all without fuss, which in these latter days of our centralisation and interminable report-writing is an important consideration for desk-tied officials. The more serious troubles on the Mahsud border had distracted attention from the Shiranis for the previous year or two; and in 1882, when their account was examined, the outstandings against the tribe were found to be too heavy to be realised by the district, but, nevertheless, hardly authorised practices explained above. Opportunely, too, about this time, a band of Shirani marau-
