LOVE songs are plentiful with the Afghans, though whether they are acquainted with love is rather doubtful. Woman with the Afghans is a purchasable commodity; she is not wooed and won with her own consent; she is bought from her father. The average price of a young and good-looking girl is from about three hundred to five hundred rupees. To reform the ideas of an Afghan upon that matter would be a desperate task. When Seid Ahmed, the great Wahabi leader, the prophet, leader, and king of the Yusufzai Afghans, tried to abolish the marriage by sale, his power fell at once, he had to flee for his life, and died an outlaw. There is no song in the world so sad and dismal as that which is sung to the bride by her friends. They come to congratulate—no, to console her; like Jephthah’s daughter; they go to her, sitting in a corner, and sing:—

  All of love that the Afghan knows is jealousy. All crimes are said to have their cause in one of the three z’s: zar, zamin, or zan—money, earth, or woman; the third z is, in fact, the most frequent of the three causes.

  The Afghan love song is artificial; the Afghan poet seems to have been at the school of the Minnesinger or the Troubadours. It is the same mièvrerie which seems almost to amuse itself with its love—more witty than passionate, a play of imagination more than a cry of the heart. They would have felt with Petrarch or Heine, si parva licet componere magnis. There is much of the convenu and of the poetical commonplace in their songs, as there is in those of their elder brothers in Europe. You will hardly find one in which you do not meet the clinking of the pezvan (the ring in the nose of the Afghan beauty), the blinking of the gold muhurs dangling from her hair, the radiance of the green mole on her cheek; and the flames of separation, and the begging of the beggar, the dervish at her door, come as pilgrim of love; and the sickness of the sick waiting for health at her hand; and the warbling of the tuti, sighing by night for his beloved kharo bird. Yet, in the long run, one finds a charm in these rather affected strains, though not the direct, straightforward, all-possessing rapture of simple and sincere emotion. It is difficult to give in a translation an idea of that charm, as it can hardly be separated from the simple, monotonous tune ever recurring, as well as from the rich and high-sounding rhyme for which the Afghan poet has the instinct of a modern Parnassian. The most popular love songs are those of Mira of Peshawer, Tavakkul of Jelalabad, and Mohammed Taila of Naushehra. Here is the world-known “Zakhmé” of Mira:—

    I shall give only one other ghazal, which derives a particular interest from the personality of its author, as well as from a touch of reverie and quaint lunacy rarely met in Afghan poetry. As I visited the prison of Abbottabad, in company with the commissioner Mr. P., I saw there a man who had been sentenced to several months’ imprisonment for breaking a Hindu’s leg in a drunken brawl. The man was not quite sane; he told Mr. P. that he was not what he was supposed to be; that he was a king, and ought to be put on the gadi. His name was Mohammadji. Next day I was surprised to hear from a native that Mohammadji was a poet, an itinerant poet from Pakli, who more than once had been in trouble with justice, for he was rather a disorderly sort of poet. Here is a ballad, written by the prisoner, which is quite a little masterpiece, “in a sensuous, elementary way,—half Baudelaire, half Song of Solomon:”—

    Poor Mohammadji, as you may see from the last stanza, was already seized with the mania of grandeur before he entered the prison at Abbottabad, though he dreamed as yet only of poetical royalty. If these lines ever reach Penjab, and find there any friend of poetry amongst the powers that be, may I be allowed to recommend to their merciful aid the poor poet of Pakli, a being doubly sacred, a poet and a divana, and one who thus doubly needs both mercy for his faults and help through life.

  There is a poetical genre peculiar to Afghan poetry: it is the misra. The misra is a distique, that expresses one idea, one feeling, and is a complete poem by itself. Poets, in poetical assaults, vie with one another in quoting or improvising misras. They refer generally to love and love affairs, and some are exquisitely simple:—

    Of the inner family life popular song is rather reticent. Of the brutality of man, the slavery of woman, the harsh voice, the insult, the strokes, the whipping at the post, the fits of mad jealousy without love, it has nothing to say. Women, however, have also their poetry and their poets, the “duman”; but that poetry goes hardly out of the walls of the harem. I was fortunate enough to gather some fragments of it, though less than I should have liked. A child is a child even to an Afghan mother:—

    The following is a nursery rhyme which I believe is unparalleled in the whole of the nursery literature; it is history as well as a lullaby.

  In the time of the Sikh domination, I am told, a Sikh carried away by force a Yusufzai girl, and took her to Lahore. Her brothers went in search of her, and found at last, after a year, the place where she lived. She had a child by the Sikh. She recognized them from the window, put the child in the cradle, and while her husband was drunk and asleep, she rocked the child with a lullaby in which she informed her brothers of all they had to do. The Sikhs are gone, but the lullaby is still sung:—

    Every life must end with “voceros.” During the agony all the family surround the dying, and repeat the sacred formula, “Ashhadu:—I bear witness that Allah is God, and there is no other God. I bear witness that Mohammed is his servant and apostle.” Thus the dying soul is kept in the remembrance of God, and brought to repeat the Ashhadu, and dies in confessing God, and is saved. In the moment when his soul goes, an angel comes, and converses, with him, questions him, and recognizing a good Mussulman, says: “Thy faith is perfect.” Then the men leave the room; the women sit around the dying bed; the daughter, sister, or wife of the deceased, standing before the dead, repeats the vocero for an hour, and at each time the chorus of women answer with a long, piercing lamentation, that thrills through the hearts of the men in the courtyard, and creates the due sorrow.

  Here are some of the voceros; a mere translation cannot of course render the effect of those simple plaints, which derive most of their power from the accent and the mere physical display of emotion.

  For a father:—

  For a mother:—

  For a husband:—

  For a daughter:—