"The Damascened Blade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cleverly Barbara)

Foreword

Coming to the end of this novel, in August 2001, I wondered how many readers would be familiar with the setting – the North-West Frontier Province of the Indian Empire – or even its neighbour, Afghanistan. How many had heard of its fiercely independent inhabitants, the Pathan? Sadly, after the events in New York and the subsequent tracking down of suspected terrorists to Afghanistan, our television screens are filled with stark images: bleak khaki hills, precipitous mountain passes, bearded and hawk-like faces shouting defiance, sinewy hands clutching Kalashnikovs, and with foreboding I read again Disraeli’s judgement: ‘The soil is barren and unproductive. The country is intersected by stupendous mountains where an army must be exposed to absolute annihilation. The people are proverbially faithless.’

And I fear that coming events may once again prove the truth of this. Alexander the Great, the Moghul emperors, the Sikhs, the British, the Russians have all left graves behind in these hills. Is it about to happen again? But then another quotation comes to mind. The Indian Viceroy, Lord Curzon, in 1904 said: ‘No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the frontier.’

Prophesy? I wouldn’t dare. But this story may well conjure up something of the character of the land and its people which seem to me to remain unchanged through the centuries.

B. C.