The end of Shah Zaman’s rule came during the icy winter of 1800, when the Kabulis finally refused to open the city gates to their luckless king. Instead, one cold winter’s night, with the falling snow soft on his lashes, he took shelter from the gathering blizzard in a fortress between Jalalabad and the Khyber. That night, he was imprisoned by his Shinwari hosts, who locked the gates, murdered his bodyguard and later blinded him with a hot needle:
