Black Partridges 9 



To resume our trip. We reached the goal of 

 our journey next day. The Helmand ran close 

 by, between banks thickly fringed with willow 

 and tamarisk, but having been tapped by many 

 canals, the river is here dwindled to a stream 

 twenty or thirty yards broad and easily fordable. 

 This is the frontier line, and the governor of the 

 neighbouring Afghan province had brought his 

 camp a few miles from ours within his own 

 limits. 



Of the following few days, which were mainly 

 devoted to official matters, I shall only mention 

 a single incident, one that had the effect of 

 placing on a pinnacle of fame a member of 

 our party, the Consulate doctor. The Afghan 

 governor was old and toothless, and among his 

 nationality, in fact among all Mahommedans, 

 an appearance of age is a cause of much sorrow 

 is not the love of wives thereby turned into 

 contumely? Anyhow, a year previously he had 

 confided to me that he had heard that " in 

 London " such things as artificial teeth were made. 

 The matter being placed in our doctor's hands, 

 there arrived in due course an apparatus for 

 taking casts of jaws. It apparently took the 

 form of saucer-like receptacles filled with plaster 

 of Paris. Now rumour in Seistan had it that 

 to obtain the lower jaw's impression, without 



