Within minutes the Queen’s message was humming toward the telegraph offices of British possessions throughout the Empire: westward to Ireland, Canada and Newfoundland, Trinidad and Tobago, the Virgin Islands, Barbados, the Bahamas, the leeward and Windward Islands, Ascension, Bermuda, British Guiana, Honduras, and the Falklands; eastward to Gibraltar and Malta in the Mediterranean; then on to Nigeria, Egypt, Gambia, the Gold Coast, Rhodesia, Cape Province, Somaliland, Uganda, and Zanzibar, to Aden on the Red Sea, to Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and then to India, Ceylon, Burma, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore; from there to Australia, North Borneo, Papua, Fiji, Pitcairn, and two dozen other island groups in the South Pacific. All these were under form of British rule-as nation-states, colonies, protectorates, suzerainties, island fortresses, and isolated coaling stations-flying the Union Jack and governed by whit military officers or civil servants speaking crisp Queen’s English.

Her message finished, Victoria, dressed in black, stepped into an open landau drawn by eight cream colored horses. Joined by a procession on fifty thousand troops from every corner of the Empire, she made her way through the London streets to St. Paul’s Cathedral for a thanksgiving service.

Victoria-and all England-had much to be thankful for. The scope, the pure dazzle of the British Empire. Flung across every continent and ocean of the world, its possessions covered one fourth of the earth’s land mass. The well-being of one quarter of the entire population of the earth was its sworn responsibility. It was a stupendous, if sprawling, success. One good reason: Britain’s navies ruled the seas. At any given moment her ships were carrying four hundred thousand passengers and crew to and from every imaginable port, rock fortress, steaming island settlement, or upcountry trading post in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the South Seas. For every thousands tons of shipping that passed through the Suez Canal during the year of the Jubilee, seven hundred came on British ships.

England itself was securely in conservative hands. Lord Salisbury’s cabinet, elected two years earlier, included two marquises, two dukes, an earl, a viscount, three barons, and three baronets: a government whose aristocratic credentials made it the perfect mirror for the burst of “new imperialism” which spread over England that smiling summer. The jubilee morning marked the zenith of the Empire. For those who attended, the jubilee itself was proof enough that England was favored among the nations of the world. “The sun never looked down until yesterday upon the embodiment of so much energy and power,” one paper crowed. Another commentator estimated that the Jubilee would be “the costliest event in the world’s history.” The premiers of eleven colonies rode in parade with Victoria, as did twenty-three princess, a grand duke, forty Indian maharajas, and a crown prince. The fifty thousand troops who marched were thought to form the “largest military force ever assembled in London.” Onlookers caught the sweep of the Empire just from reading the names of the regiments: Canadian Hussars, New South Wales Lancers, Trinidad Light Horses, the Zaptichs of Cyprus, the Jamaica Artillery, the Bengal Lancers, the Bikaner camel troops, the Royal Nigerian Constabulary.

The clear, shimmering skies-“Queen’s weather”-remained bright until sunset. Troops filed past, drums beat, a thousand Union Jacks snapped in the breeze. And at the end of the procession, while millions cheered, Victoria passed, alternately weeping and waving. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given me,” the Queen wrote in her journal after returning to the palace. And she was probably right.

Caught up in the heady brilliance of the day, it would have been difficult for any Englishman no to believe that Great Britain was destined-indeed, called-to rule. In a thousand dark corners of the earth, the rule of law prevails while ignorant savages were enlightened and their burdens eased-all through the power and good offices of the British Empire. A former civil servant in India told the House of commons that there was “a cherished conviction shared by every Englishman in India, from the highest to the lowest, by the planter’s assistant in his lonely bungalow and by the editor in the full light of his presidency town, from the Chief Commissioner in charge of an important province to the Viceroy upon his throne-the conviction in every man that be belongs to a race which God has destined to govern and to subdue.”

And who could argue with the notion? On this halcyon June day, it would have been difficult for even the surest Anglophobe to disagree. There had been nothing like this since the days of Rome. Pax Britannica reigned. The Empire was secure.

In one of the remoter corners of the Empire that June morning-next to a green field in the northwest tip of British India-one of Victoria’s younger subjects, the seven-year old Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was working mighty to stop a log floating in the shallows of the river Swat. The sun was bright, the air over the valley morning-cool. Behind the boy, the fields of his father’s farm stretched wide and green toward the ridges of the Khyber Pass.

Ghaffar Khan had probably never heard of Victoria. Here in the North-West Frontier the British political agent was king, and a remote woman monarch on a throne thousands of miles away could not have meant a great deal even to an educated Pathan. At the moment, what mattered to the boy was a log curling away from the bank into the current.
“Ghaffar!” The word fell faintly over the river, like a chime struck far away. The boy swirled his stick closer to the log.

“Ghaffar!” It hovered again, then vanished. The boy kept swirling.
It was not unusual for Ghaffar Khan to have to be called more than once. He was an intense boy who easily lost himself in the green world of his father’s farm- in the fields of cane and cotton, the orchards of plum, peach, orange, and persimmon- and the slow, dark waters of the river Swat.

Ghaffar Khan was the youngest child in the family of Behram Khan. He had tow sisters and an elder brother, Abdul Jabbar, who was attending the Edwards Memorial Mission High School in Peshawar, the provincial capital. Ghaffar did not get to see him much. But now it was June and school was out, so he and his brother had been spending long, languid hours along the river, occasionally rafting over to the tiny island in the middle. When he was alone, as now, he would often walk into the village here his friends lived. He especially liked the sons of the laborers and craftsmen-uncommon for a Khan’s son-and two of his best friends were bhangis, sweepers.

This fragrant morning seemed made for churning the river water with a stick, so he had left the farmhouse early and settled down near the shallow, where the ducks and wild swans fed. Then he saw the log, too tantalizing a treasure to pass up.

“Ghaffar!” This time the call cracked the air like a rifle shot and the boy snapped around. It was his father calling. He jumped onto the thread of path that skirted the river and sprinted toward the farmhouse through a cane row.

Behram Khan was standing near the oak gate, a basket of unleavened bread balanced on his head. “Ghaffar!” he boomed when he saw the boy. “Let’s go. I need your help.” Some travelers had spent the night in their guest house and needed to be fed.

Behram Khan came from a line of Pathan farmers who had settled in the rich Peshawar Valley many decades before. They had given up the independence of the theoretically free but generally poor tribes of the hills to prosper in a “settled” area-under the yoke of British role. For strategic reasons the British had divided the Frontier into three geographic groups: the Agencies in the north, the so-called settled districts between the Indus River and the hills, and the “free” areas along the western border where the Pathans were left to govern themselves under Pushtunwali, “the Law of the Pathans.”

The Jubilee summer perhaps two million Pathans lived on the Frontier, divided into dozens of tribes and subgroups. Among larger tribes were the Afridis, who were paid by the British to “guard” the Khyber Pass (from their own marauding), and the Muhmands and Yousafzais, who lived in the mountainous provinces north of Peshawar. South of the Khyber, next to the Afridis, lived the Orakzais. Further south were the Waziris and Mahsuds, perhaps the fiercest and most volatile of the Pathan tribes.

The Raj “subsidized” these tribes, paying them to keep the peace. The British generally left them alone, unless they caused trouble-which was often. During the four decades of their rule on the Frontier, the British had sent fifty expeditions into the “free” territories to punish rebellious tribes. The policy never really worked, but it was better than all-out war.
Behram Khan’s tribe, the Mohmmedzais, was smaller than most Pathan tribes and was generally prosperous and peaceful. Behram Khan himself was wealthy. He owned all the fields that stretched beyond the big farmhouse and along the river Swat. Furthermore, he was the Khan-the chief-of Utmanzai, a village about twenty miles north of Peshawar.

Utmanzai was a prosperous village, with wide lanes and two stories houses made of thick timbers and clay. It lay almost at the geographical center of the North-West Frontier Province, midway between the Chinese border on the north and the barren southern deserts of Bsluchistan bordering Iran. North of the village were the mountainous regions of Swat, Dir, Buner, and Bajure, thickly forested and laced with tumbling rivers. Around Peshawar the hills gave way to the wide river bottoms of the Peshawar and Kurram valleys. East of Umanzai was the broad Indus River and beyond it, India. If the young Ghaffar Khan and his father had stopped and looked west as they walked toward their guest house that June morning, they would have seen the tanned, bare hills of the Khyber Pass, the gateway between central Asia and British India.

Travelers from any of these areas might have been found staying in Behram Khan’s guest house. Most likely, however, they would be from the North, since Utmanzai lay along one of the main roads between Peshawar and the northern highlands. Wherever they were from, whatever their intent, the Pathan social code of melmastia, hospitality, dictated that they be treated as honored guests, entitled to food and lodging. Every Pathan village has at least one guest house or derah for this purpose. Wealthier Pathans like Behram Khan built their own, for a large, comfortable derah-with good food, amply given-is the key to status in a Pathan village, and khans commonly competed to attract the men of the village to share their hospitability. It was in the derahs that villagers gathered to chat, smoke tobacco from a common water pipe, and sip hot green qahwa tea from a hissing samovar. These evening get-togethers could go on far into the night. Exhilarated by the strong tea and companionship, the men would tell stories, sing songs together, or simply tease and bluster. Sometimes Behram Khan would lie back on his pillow and tell the gallows for Pathan honor.

Honor! Probably no word stirs a Pathan more deeply. No matter what his station in life, honor has long been the true calling of a Pathan. And God help the British, the men would agree, if all the Pathan clans-Afridi, Mohmand, Yousafzai, Mahsud, Waziri, Muhammedzai, and Orakzai-ever set aside their differences and rose as one nation to drive the foreign unbelievers from their homelands. In the firelight, a trace of blood lust would steal across the dark, gleaming faces as they elaborated the unspeakable fate that awaited the British. Life without freedom made little sense to a Pathan- for without freedom how could there be honor?

It was not unusual on such occasions for some robed figure to bring out a surnai and fill the evening with haunting, flutelike music. Another might begin to chant-slowly, with a measured rhythm-a poem of the immortal Khushal Khan:

The young men have dyed red their hands
As the falcon dyes his talons in the blood of his prey!
They have reddened their pale swords with blood:
They have made the tulip-bed blossom
In the middle of the summer.

Behram Khan’s guest house was long and low. Ghaffar always approached the building with suppressed excitement, for he never knew what all, turbaned strangers might have spent the night. He might find a blue-eyed Afridi from the Khyber or a Yousafzai in white pyjamas from one of the terraced farms of the Malakand, or a Swati on his way to the big city-hair scented, eyes darkened with collyrium, a rose tucked behind his ear and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Or it might be a Hazara from the far North, beardless and with slanted eyes. They were all Pathans: they bantered in the same pushto that Ghaffar’s own Muhammedzai clan spoke, and they all loved to sit in a circle and share a water pipe and the news.
Behram Khan had many servants, but he carried food to his guests himself and served it with his own hands. The code of hospitality did not demand this, and no other khan of the district was known to practice it. But the devout khan told his sons, “An unknown traveler is a guest sent to us by God. I will serve him myself.”

That day of June 1897 the derahs of Utmanzai would have been humming with news of much greater interest than a remote queen’s diamond jubilee. Mohmands or Swatis from the north, visiting Behram Khan on their way to Peshawar, would have talked excitedly of Mullah Mastun, a firebrand priest who had recently returned from a pilgrimage to Afghanistan and was now touring the mountain areas north of Utmanzai to preach that the time had come to turn out the British. The Prophet himself had told him the hour had come. Mullah Mastun promised that “he would throw stones into the Swat River and they would become artillery shells to flying back at the infidel.”

Behram Khan would not have been surprised. Pathan mullahs often urged their followers to take up arms. But the last uprising in Chitral, two years earlier, had brought out a British force of fifteen thousand troops and convinced the British that they needed more forts and roads up there. It didn’t seem likely that the northerners would have forgotten all of that so soon. To Behram Khan, it must have seemed just one more call to revolt in the long history of rebellion since the British took control of the Frontier some fifty years before.