the obedience of his people. On September 2nd of that year, 1879, Cavagnari wrote to the government of India to say, “All is well with the Kabul embassy.”8 It was an eerie echo of the letter Macnaghten had written to a friend in India thirty-eight years earlier to declare that all is quiet in Afghanistan “from Dan to Beersheba.” Just months after writing those words, Macnaghten was dead; Cavagnari was dead one day after writing this letter.
