Word: pathan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Disguised in turn as an Indian healer, a Persian Dervish, a Pathan, Burton escaped five bandit raids, performed the complicated Moslem rituals letter-perfect (a slip-up meant being crucified), did not return to England to capitalize on his fame or to refute a new assortment of rumors that he had robbed a Cairo post office and murdered an Arab who saw through his disguise. Instead he headed an expedition into unmapped Somaliland. succeeded where five previous attempts had failed in reaching Harar, saved himself by a feat of flattery from being killed. On another expedition into Somaliland...
...cracked earth, drowning others. From the fast-rotting bodies of the dead, cholera germs fanned out across Quetta. Then the earth began to rock once more, settling the ruins deeper, and a landslide rolled down the nearby Mountain of Death. In this fantastic register of disaster, a Pathan raid failed to materialize at once only because the earthquake had shaken their hill villages too. Sir Alexander asked and got the power to declare martial law, inasmuch as all the police were dead. Then he sealed Quetta like a tomb, for fear of cholera. Only soldiers prowled through the stinking city...
Guerrilla warfare between British garrisons on the northwest frontier and bellicose Pathan tribesmen, begun when a band of Afridi ambuscaded a party of Indian cavalry in the orchards outside Peshawar (TIME, Aug. 18), continued last week. Although Royal Air Force bombers peppered the tribesmen with as many as 50 tons of bombs in a single day, Pesha- war continued surrounded by hostile besiegers. Some observers began to doubt the efficacy of the R. A. F.'s aerial attack. One rumor was that the Afridi left their capes and turbans lying on the ground when they heard the planes coming over...
...lesson deserves the careful attention of the Imperial General Staff. Whatever may be the effect of bombing airplanes in open countries like Irak where vast stretches of ground are open as a cricket pitch, it would seem that punitive action from the air has lost its terrors to the Pathan. Against mobile and intelligent opposition in broken, mountainous country the mobility of the air arm for offensive purposes may have been overrated." At Bombay the British arrested and imprisoned for three months white-mustached Vallabhai Patel, fourth successor to Saint Gandhi in the civil disobedience campaign...