The Keepers of the People

the devices of a Haroun Al Raschid — Harun al-Rashid, Abbasid caliph (786–809), who in the Thousand and One Nights walks Baghdad by night in disguise to learn what his people are saying. The comparison is made twice, and by Althea; it is her way of explaining how Prince Ralph knows everything.

a maiden of Kafiristan to breed him children of a harder strain — Kafiristan, "the land of the infidels," the region of the Hindu Kush whose pre-Islamic peoples had kept an archaic religion of their own. Sir George Scott Robertson's The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush (1896) was the first full English account of them and was two years old when this novel appeared. Kafiristan was conquered and forcibly converted by the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan of Afghanistan in 1895–96 and renamed Nuristan, "the land of light." Jepson's valley is the one that did not fall.

many hundreds of perilous miles into Hindostan to carry off a Princess of Rajpootana — Hindustan, the north Indian plain; Rajputana, the princely states of what is now Rajasthan. Both are period spellings and have been left.

the Pavilion of Wonderful Delights — the harem of the Princes, built by the first Prince after his wife's death. Jepson's account of it is worth rereading after II.xvii: "the beautiful girls, flowers in an oven, withered in that scorching air."

Chapter iv

in the Crimea, the Mutiny, the Franco-German war, under Osman of Plevna — the Crimean War (1853–56); the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58; the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71); and the siege of Plevna (July–December 1877), where Osman Nuri Pasha held an entrenched position against the Russians for five months and became a European celebrity for it. Colonel Sayers's career is a plausible soldier of fortune's, and every war in it was fought against or alongside Russians.

the Rajah of Gukuwar … the Ameer of Afghanistan … raiding the Goyal tribes — the Amir is Abdur Rahman Khan, who ruled Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901. Gukuwar and the Goyal tribes appear to be Jepson's inventions.

the new rifles he had brought with him from Europe … the new guns — the British service rifle of the day was a magazine rifle of the Lee pattern, the Lee-Metford and then the Lee-Enfield; the "machine guns" of the Russian force at II.x are Maxims, the first true machine gun, taken into British service at the end of the 1880s and by 1898 the standard instrument of colonial warfare.