Safdar had ascended the throne by chucking one brother off a cliff, beheading a second, dismembering a third, poisoning his mother, and garroting his father, who had murdered his own father by sending him a smallpox-laced robe. “Patricide and fratricide may be said to be hereditary failings of the royal families of Hunza,” contemporary historian E. F. Knight once noted. The Mir, “whose cruelty was unrelieved by any redeeming feature,” took personal and military advice from a drum pounded by invisible hands, audible only to him.
