Sorrow Returns to the Khyber Pass

The Khyber Pass! A name that evokes mystery of exotic locales and world-shaping events, a high mountain pass separating great cultures, both dividing and connecting East and West, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traders on the Silk Road traversed it. Darius the Great, King of Persia from 522 to 486 BC, took his army through it. So did Alexander the Great in 326 BC. In 1220 Genghis Khan led his Mongol army through it to conquer Arabia. Britain fought three wars over it from 1839 to 1919. History records dozens of other conquerors crossing the Khyber, the latest being the United States in 2001.
Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in “Ballad of the King’s Jest”:

“When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.”

Kipling set the one of the central events in his book, Kim, in the Khyber Pass and called it "a sword cut through the mountains." The book describes “the great game,” the cold war between Britain and Russia for imperial hegemony in Afghanistan. Winston Churchill, then a young newspaper correspondent, in 1897 said of the Khyber Pass, “Each rock and hill along the pass had a story to tell!"
When war erupted there again this fall, the headline (“More than 100,000 flee from offensive: anti-Taliban fighting drives residents out of Khyber district into Peshawar”, The Vancouver Sun September 15, 2009), awakened a deep memory--no, not a memory, only a dream, one I've held for 47 years. I have never been there. This was a deja vu: In December, 1979, when Russia seized Afghanistan, I read that one of their invasion routes was eastward from Kabul through the Khyber Pass. It evoked the same memory, of a story I'd read in high school. I could not remember where I had read it, but now with the power of the InterNet I found out. I discovered a pdf file of the story at http://mrspollifax.com/downloadfiles/sorrowridesafasthorse.pdf, “Sorrow rides a fast horse.” It is a short story by Dorothy Gilman Butters in the Ladies Home Journal, September, 1962. I was a junior in high school. Since my Mom did not subscribe to that magazine, we must have read it in English class. I can still repeat the pivotal event of the story from memory, and it still brings tears to my eyes:
A mother, grief-stricken from the death of her husband, takes her two children on a whirl-wind trip around the world. In the Khyber Pass, her family and their elderly guide are captured by bandits. Their leader speaks to the guide, who translates. They don't want just the money, the food, and the donkeys. They want the woman and the children. The guide says sadly, “It must by your qismat—your fate—to stop here.” She seems to awake, as if from a dream, and says harshly, “My qismat? Tell this man I must travel like the wind—that is my qismat. Tell him that Sorrow rides behind me on a fast horse—if he listens closely, he may hear the hoof beats. Tell him that if he captures me, he will capture Sorrow as well—because where I go Sorrow goes and where I stop, Sorrow will stop.”
The bandits confer. Their leader finally makes a statement. The guide translates: “He says it has been a hard year, with many people dead in their village. Sheep have sickened and died. He says they do not wish for more Sorrow. If Sorrow follows behind you then you must leave these mountains at once. You must not stop even to sleep.” To ensure their prompt departure, the bandits guide them through the Khyber Pass.
Ever since reading this story at age 15 (now I'm 62), I have wanted to see the Khyber Pass for myself. Sadly, it seems that I waited too long. At least for now, it is ruined by war, too dangerous for tourists. As foreign armies rage back and forth across the pass, the local people have again greeted sorrow.