Peshawar pop-corn was as edible under its Pushtu name as at the Chicago World's Fair, barring the grit of the black sand driven into every snowy kernel. Sweetmeat shops and peddlers' stands overflowed with gujack and kindred candies, thickly peppered with the dust of the streets.
The caravans bring down the white Kabul grapes which, packed in cotton in small, round wooden boxes, are sold at remotest railway stations all over India each winter; and such mountainous stores of pistachios, almonds, walnuts, raisins, figs, and fruits from fertile Afghan and Persian vales, as made one imagine a great horn of plenty had been tipped through the Khyber Pass and its contents spread over Peshawar plain. For twenty centuries at least the povindahs, or traveling merchants, have brought caravans down from Kabul, Bokhara, and Samarkand every autumn. They bring horses, wool, woolen stuffs, silks, dyes, gold thread, fruits, and precious stones, fighting and buying their way to British lines, where, leaving their arms, they are free and safe to wander at will to Delhi, Agra, and Calcutta, appearing even at Rangoon and Tuticorin each winter. The railway has changed something of their habits now, and all save the horse-dealers leave their animals to graze near Peshawar while they take train to the uttermost parts of the peninsula, and, returning when their wares are sold, lead their camels back to the cool plateaus and valleys of the north for the summer.
Kafila, or caravans, bringing more and more of Afghan wares, were defiling in through the city
