r's
influence.

In all Muhammadan countries women hold a very inferior, almost
humiliating, position, being regarded as very distinctly existing
for the requirements of the stronger sex. In Afghanistan they labour
under this additional hardship, that the men are nearly all cruel
and jealous to a degree in their disposition, and among the lower
sections of the community the severe conditions of life compel the
women to labour very hard and continuously--labour which the men
think it beneath their dignity to lighten or share.

The wife has to grind the corn, fetch the water, cook the food, tend
the children, keep the house clean--in fact, do everything except
shopping, from which she is strictly debarred. The husband will
not only buy the articles of food required for the daily household
consumption, but he will buy her dresses too--or, at least, the
material for them--and the lady must be content with his selection,
and make up her dresses at home with what her lord is pleased to
bring her. How would their sisters in England approve of that?

The fetching of the water is often no sinecure. If the well is in the
village precincts it may be pleasant enough, as it no doubt affords
excellent opportunity for retailing all the village gossip; but in
some places, as, for instance, during summer in Marwat, the nearest
water is six or seven, or even ten, miles away, and the journey
there and back has to be made at least every other day. In Marwat
the women saddle up their asses with the leathern bottles made from
goatskins long before daybreak, and the nocturnal traveller sometimes
meets long strings of these animals going to or returning from the
watering-place under the care of a number of the village women and
girls. The animals in these cases have to be satisfied with what they
drink while at the source of the water-supply.

When the women get back to their houses it will be still scarcely
dawn, but they have a busy time before them, which will occupy them
till midday. First the grain has to be ground in the hand-mills; then
yesterday's milk churned; then the cows and goats milked; then the
food cooked, the house cleaned, and a hundred and one other duties
attended to which only a woman could describe.

When on the march the women are heavily loaded. They can often be seen
not only carrying the children and household utensils, but driving
the pack animals too, while the lordly men are content to carry only
their