Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 19 October 1887.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 150).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: Unreprinted and unrecorded. The Bolan Pass, now in western Pakistan, is one of the two main passes through which traffic from Afghanistan to India moves, or moved; it lies far south of the Khyber. This piece appears to be pointedly topical, but I am unable to identify any occasion for it. RK ventured into strict allegory only rarely – e.g. in ‘The Children of the Zodiac’ (Many Inventions) or the poem ‘A Legend of Truth’ (Songs from Books). This is one of the items from his Indian journalism that RK selected for inclusion in the never published ‘Book of the Forty-Five Mornings’. The cutting in Scrapbook 3 has been lightly corrected by RK, no doubt in anticipation of its reprinting in ‘The Book of the Forty-Five Mornings’.

Very long ago, before there was a beneficent Sirkar or a Kumpany Bahadur – even before Sir Thomas Roe got drunk at Ajmir for the good of his country, and when men killed their neighbours as often and as cruelly as they knew how – the four Very Important Sisters, Wealth, Wisdom, Strength and Liberty, turned their backs upon Europe and went into the East to seek their fortunes. The reasons of their departure were never made public. Perhaps it was an annual pleasure-trip, or perhaps some one on the Continents had insulted them. At any rate they all walked away. Wealth, as everybody knows, goes quickly. She led the way. Strength walked behind her; Wisdom made her progress with difficulty, and little Liberty trotted last, for she was weak and undeveloped, and the stones of the Persian bridle-paths cut her feet terribly.

It is said that, as they travelled, Wealth and Wisdom stayed to flirt with the Parsees and some of the Persians; while strength went on and spent a day in the black tents of the Turkomans. The results of that interview have been disastrous to the Persians up to the present hour.