“His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is still talking, and if so, why?” he said to the Pathan, who translated it.

Linforth gave up the attempt to renew his friendship with Shere Ali.  He must go back to Peshawur and tell Ralston that he had failed.  Ralston would merely shrug his shoulders and express neither disappointment nor surprise.  But it was a moment of bitterness to Linforth.  He looked at Shere Ali’s indifferent face, he listened for a second or two to the tune he still hummed, and he turned away.  But he had not taken more than a couple of steps towards the entrance of the balcony when his guide touched him cautiously upon the elbow.

Linforth stopped and looked back.  The three men were once more gazing at the steps which led down from the road to the well.  And once more a water-carrier descended with his great earthen jar upon his head.  He descended very cautiously, but as he came to the turn of the steps his foot slipped suddenly.

Linforth uttered a cry, but the man had not fallen.  He had tottered for a moment, then he had recovered himself.  But the earthen jar which he carried on his head had fallen and been smashed to atoms.

Again the three made a simultaneous movement, but this time it was a movement of joy.  Again an exclamation burst from Shere Ali’s lips, but now it was a cry of triumph.

He stood erect, and at once he turned to go.  As he turned he met Linforth’s gaze.  All expression died out of his face, but he spoke to his young courtier, who fluttered forward sniggering with amusement.

“His Highness would like to know if his Excellency is interested in a Road.  His Highness thinks it a damn-fool road.  His Highness much regrets that he cannot even let it go beyond Kohara.  His Highness wishes his Excellency good-morning.”

Linforth made no answer to the gibe.  He passed out into the courtyard, and from the courtyard through the archway into the grain-market.  Opposite to him at the end of the street, a grass hill, with the chalk showing at one bare spot on the side of it, ridged up against the sky curiously like a fragment of the Sussex Downs.  Linforth wondered whether Shere Ali had ever noticed the resemblance, and whether some recollection of the summer which he had spent at Poynings had ever struck poignantly home as he had stood upon these steps.  Or were all these memories quite dead within his breast?

In one respect Shere Ali was wrong.  The Road would go on—­now.  Linforth had done his best to hinder it, as Ralston had bidden him to do, but he had failed, and the Road would go on to the foot of the Hindu Kush.  Old Andrew Linforth’s words came back to his mind: 

“Governments will try to stop it; but the power of the Road will be greater than the power of any Government.  It will wind through valleys so deep that the day’s sunshine is gone within the hour.  It will be carried in galleries along the faces of the mountains, and for eight months of the year sections of it will be buried deep in snow.  Yet it will be finished.”