“I am unhurt,” he wrote at the beginning of the letter, and tears of gratitude ran down her cheeks as she read the words.  “Shere Ali,” he continued, “occupied a traditional position of defence in a narrow valley.  The Kohara river ran between steep cliffs through the bed of the valley, and, as usual, above the cliffs on each side there were cultivated maidans or plateaus.  Over the right-hand maidan, the road—­our road—­ran to a fortified village.  Behind the village, a deep gorge, or nullah, as we call them in these parts, descending from a side glacier high up at the back of the hills on our right, cut clean across the valley, like a great gash.  The sides of the nullah were extraordinarily precipitous, and on the edge furthest from us stone sangars were already built as a second line of defence.  Shere Ali occupied the village in front of the nullah, and we encamped six miles down the valley, meaning to attack in the morning.  But the Chiltis abandoned their traditional method of fighting behind walls and standing on the defence.  A shot rang out on the outskirts of our camp at three o’clock in the morning, and in a moment they were upon us.  It was reckoned that there were fifteen thousand of them engaged from first to last in this battle, whereas we were under two thousand combatants.  We had seven hundred of the Imperial Service troops, four companies of Gurkhas, three hundred men of the Punjab Infantry, three companies of the Oxfordshires, besides cavalry, mountain batteries and Irregulars.  The attack was unexpected.  We bestrode the road, but Shere Ali brought his men in by an old disused Buddhist road, running over the hills on our right hand, and in the darkness he forced his way through our lines into a little village in the heart of our position.  He seized the bazaar and held it all that day, a few houses built of stone and with stones upon the roof which made them proof against our shells.  Meanwhile the slopes on both sides of the valley were thronged with Chiltis.  They were armed with jezails and good rifles stolen from our troops, and they had some old cannon—­sher bachas as they are called.  Altogether they caused us great loss, and towards evening things began to look critical.  They had fortified and barricaded the bazaar, and kept up a constant fire from it.  At last a sapper named Manders, with half a dozen Gurkhas behind him, ran across the open space, and while the Gurkhas shot through the loop holes and kept the fire down, Manders fixed his gun cotton at the bottom of the door and lighted the fuse.  He was shot twice, once in the leg, once in the shoulder, but he managed to crawl along the wall of the houses out of reach of the explosion, and the door was blown in.  We drove them out of that house and finally cleared the bazaar after some desperate fighting.  Shere Ali was in the thick of it.  He was dressed from head to foot in green, and was a conspicuous mark.  But he escaped unhurt.  The enemy drew off for the night, and we lay down