1895.] on a Recent Journey in Afghanistan. 571 



The workshops are a big range of buildings situated on the banks 

 of the Kabul river, outside the town, where are employed some 1000 

 or 1100 native men and boys, under the superintendence of 100 

 Hindoo artificers, who have been trained in the factories and work- 

 shops of India. These shops have in the main been designed and are 

 mostly used by the Amir for the output of military material in one 

 form or another, and upon them he expends yearly the greater part of 

 the subsidy which he receives from the Indian Government, instead, 

 as many other Oriental potentates would have done, of retaining it in 

 bullion or converting it into hoarded treasure. There are turned out 

 the most modern and scientific implements of warfare, from Hotchkiss 

 and Gatling guns, made on the exact pattern of the original, down to 

 Martini rifles and Snider carbines. There are manufactured shot and 

 shell, cartridges, cartridge boxes, swords, knives and sabres ; saddlery, 

 boots, straps, stirrups, bits, bridles, bugles, scabbards and trunks. 

 You may almost turn in a naked Afghan at one end, like the fabled 

 pig in the stockyards at Chicago, and expect to see him come out at 

 the other end fully accoutred and equipped as a nineteenth century 

 fighting machine. 



Nor is this all, for in an adjoining building silver bars are being 

 cut up into the Amir's smart new currency of Kabuli rupees at the 

 rate of 20,000 a day. Hard by, soap is being manufactured at the 

 rate of 10 tons a week, though I very much doubt if any Afghan has 

 yet applied the native composition to his personal toilette. And 

 candles emerge at the rate of 100,000 in the same period. Elsewhere 

 English stallions, one of them a Derby runner, bought from the 

 Prince of Wales, are employed, under the superintendence of an 

 English stud groom, in improving the various native breeds of horses. 

 English sheep and cattle are similarly engaged with the native flocks 

 and herds ; while an English tailor makes beautiful uniforms, re- 

 splendent with gold lace and epaulettes, with which to deck the 

 bodies of the ministers and officers and grandees. From the street 

 outside the palace the little miniature railway of Kabul starts, and 

 runs for a distance of seven miles to some limestone quarries in the 

 hills, whence it brings down the stone which is employed by the Amir 

 in these and kindred works for the beautification or the strengthening 

 of his capital. 



I next turn to my interviews and conversation with the Amir 

 Abdur Eahman Khan. During the fortnight of my stay at Kabul I 

 saw him six times, and rarely for less than three hours at a time. 

 The Amir is a great conversationalist, and as the whole business of 

 the court and the government is conducted by him personally, for the 

 most part by word of mouth, he and his surroundings are equally 

 accustomed to long sittings, or rather standings (for in his presence no 

 Afghan, not even his own sons, sit), extending over the greater part of 

 the day. The audiences were invariably fixed for 1 p.m. At the first 

 and last of these I wore uniform; on the intervening occasions, 

 dressed in London morning costume, I was driven in one of the 



