As we anticipated, the Guides were nearly crushed on the
Panjkora. According to a native officer of the clan which attacked them, the clansmen craved for their rifles, and two thousand of them organised a night attack. They crept up close, and word was just passing from chief to chief to rush forward, when "at that very moment a devil's gun boomed forth, and lo ! instead of bullets and balls coming out, there burst over us a mighty light, so great that we thought the night had suddenly become day. And we cried aloud to Allah to abate his wrath against us, and when the great light faded we all hurried away, and even our Moollahs had no word to say." A "star shell" had been thrown, showing an intense magnesium blaze which revealed the assailants, and which they took for a magic light permitted by Allah to discomfit them. No Mahommedan will fight God or Destiny, and the heart went out of them as it went out of Theodore of Abyssinia, when, in his high rock-fortress of Magdala, a rocket reached his feet. He was a man of courage tried and proved, but he asked, "Am I expected to contend with things like that ?" and a few hours afterwards committed suicide. Science has clad the Westerns in a sort of enchanted armour, and also, we greatly fear, the Japanese.
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