{"book":"adl0973","page":176,"text":"fell into the hands of the Bacha, he came\nto Kabul and entered the service of the\nbandit. He soon gained the Bacha's confi-\ndence and became one of his favourites.)\nThe contents of the letter were interesting\nindeed. The Marshal was asked to give up\nthe fight and to send his allegiance. He was\npromised in return any post that he would\nlike to have, and the full benefits of his\nproperty. Failing this, it was threatened\nthat all the members of his family, sixty-\none in number, who were then in Kabul,\nwould be at once put to death. Besides\nthis, Abdul Latif also brought the message,\nthat if the Marshal had any ambition for\nthe throne, the Bacha agreed to decide the\nmatter by drawing lots on the Marshal's\narrival at Kabul. The Marshal in the\npresence of all read out the letter, and the\naudience could not help bursting into\nlaughter, specially at the strange concession\nthat the Bacha was ready to offer. The\nMarshal's reply was in the following terms :—\n\nTo, Habibullah, the son of a water-\ncarrier,\n\nI got your message and the offer it\n\n137","chars":1049,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00176.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/176","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/176","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0973/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0973_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}