Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

"crank" on page 147 is a possible typo.

"Bamain" on page 213 is a possible typo.

"Semetic" on page 225 is a possible typo.

"Zoroastian" on page 270 is a possible typo.

"Aegospotami" (in index) not found in text.

"Kardos" (in index) not found in text.

Spelling differences between the index and the text were resolved in favor of the text.

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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MELBOURNE

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

THE
GATES OF INDIA

BEING
AN HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

BY
COLONEL SIR THOMAS HOLDICH
K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., C.B., D.Sc.
AUTHOR OF
'THE INDIAN BORDERLAND,' 'INDIA,' 'THE COUNTRIES OF THE KING'S AWARD'

WITH MAPS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1910

PREFACE

As the world grows older and its composition both physical and human becomes subject to ever-increasing scientific investigation, the close interdependence of its history and its geography becomes more and more definite. It is hardly too much to say that geography has so far shaped history that in unravelling some of the more obscure entanglements of historical record, we may safely appeal to our modern knowledge of the physical environment of the scene of action to decide on the actual course of events. Oriental scholars for many years past have been deeply interested in reshaping the map of Asia to suit their theories of the sequence of historical action in India and on its frontiers. They have identified the position of ancient cities in India, sometimes with marvellous precision, and have been able to assign definite niches in history to historical personages with whose story it would have been most difficult to deal were it not intertwined with marked features of geographical environment. But on the far frontiers of India, beyond the Indus, these geographical conditions have only been imperfectly known until recently. It is only within the last thirty years that the geography of the hinterland of India—Tibet, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan—have been in any sense brought under scientific examination, and at the best such examination has been partial and incomplete. It is unfortunate that recent years have added nothing to our knowledge of Afghanistan, and it seems hopeless to wait for detailed information as to some of the more remote (and most interesting) districts of that historic country. As, therefore, in the course of twenty years of official wanderings I have amassed certain notes which may help to throw some light on the ancient highways and cities of those trans-frontier regions which contain the landward gates of India, I have thought it better to make some use of these notes now, and to put together the various theories that I may have formed from time to time bearing on the past history of that country, whilst the opportunity lasts. I have endeavoured to present my own impressions at first hand as far as possible, unbiased by the views already expressed by far more eminent writers than myself, believing that there is a certain value in originality. I have also endeavoured to keep the descriptive geography of such districts as form the theatre of historical incidents on a level with the story itself, so that the one may illustrate the other.

Whilst investigating the methods of early explorers into the hinterland of India it has, of course, been necessary to appeal to the original narratives of the explorers themselves so far as possible. Consequently I am indebted to the assistance afforded by quite a host of authors for the basis of this compilation. And I may briefly recount the names of those to whom I am under special obligation. First and foremost are Mr. M'Crindle's admirable series of handy little volumes dealing with the Greek period of Indian history, the perusal of which first prompted an attempt to reconcile some of the apparent discrepancies between classical story and practical geography, with which may be included Sir A. Cunningham's Coins of Alexander's Successors in Kabul. For the Arab phase of commercial exploration I am indebted to Sir William Ouseley's translation, Oriental Geography of Ibn Haukel, and the Géographie d'Edrisi; traduite par P. Aimedée Joubert. For more modern records the official reports of Burnes, Lord, and Leech on Afghanistan; Burnes' Travels into Bokhara, etc.; Cabul, by the same author; Ferrier's Caravan Journeys; Wood's Journey to the Sources of the Oxus; Moorcroft's Travels in the Himalayan Provinces; Vigne's Ghazni, Kabul, and Afghanistan; Henry Pottinger's Travels in Baloochistan and Sinde; and last, but by no means least, Masson's Travels in Afghanistan, Beluchistan, the Panjab, and Kalat, all of which have been largely indented on. To this must be added Mr. Forrest's valuable compilation of Bombay records. It has been indeed one of the objects of this book to revive the records of past generations of explorers whose stories have a deep significance even in this day, but which are apt to be overlooked and forgotten as belonging to an ancient and superseded era of research. Because these investigators belong to a past generation it by no means follows that their work, their opinions, or their deductions from original observations are as dead as they are themselves. It is far too readily assumed that the work of the latest explorer must necessarily supersede that of his predecessors. In the difficult art of map compilation perhaps the most difficult problem with which the compiler has to deal is the relative value of evidence dating from different periods. Here, then, we have introduced a variety of opinions and views expressed by men of many minds (but all of one type as explorer), which may be balanced one against another with a fair prospect of eliminating what mathematicians call the "personal equation" and arriving at a sound "mean" value from combined evidence. I have said they are all of one type, regarded as explorers. There is only one word which fitly describes that type—magnificent. We may well ask have we any explorers like them in these days? We know well enough that we have the raw material in plenty for fashioning them, but alas! opportunity is wanting. Exploration in these days is becoming so professional and so scientific that modern methods hardly admit of the dare-devil, face-to-face intermixing with savage breeds and races that was such a distinctive feature in the work of these heroes of an older age. We get geographical results with a rapidity and a precision that were undreamt of in the early years (or even in the middle) of the last century. Our instruments are incomparably better, and our equipment is such that we can deal with the hostility of nature in her more savage moods with comparative facility. But we no longer live with the people about whom we set out to write books—we don't wear their clothes, eat their food, fraternize with them in their homes and in the field, learn their language and discuss with them their religion and politics. And the result is that we don't know them half as well, and the ratio of our knowledge (in India at least) is inverse to the official position towards them that we may happen to occupy. The missionary and the police officer may know something of the people; the high-placed political administrator knows less (he cannot help himself), and the parliamentary demagogue knows nothing at all. My excuse for giving so large a place to the American explorer Masson, for instance, is that he was first in the field at a critical period of Indian history. Apart from his extraordinary gifts and power of absorbing and collating information, history has proved that on the whole his judgment both as regards Afghan character and Indian political ineptitude was essentially sound. Of course he was not popular. He is as bitter and sarcastic in his unsparing criticisms of local political methods in Afghanistan as he is of the methods of the Indian Government behind them; and doubtless his bitterness and undisguised hostility to some extent discounts the value of his opinion. But he knew the Afghan, which we did not: and it is most instructive to note the extraordinary divergence of opinion that existed between him and Sir Alexander Burnes as regards some of the most marked idiosyncrasies of Afghan character. Burnes was as great an explorer as Masson, but whilst in Afghanistan he was the emissary of the Indian Government, and thus it immediately became worth while for the Afghan Sirdar to study his temper and his weaknesses and to make the best use of both. Thus arose Burnes' whole-hearted belief in the simplicity of Afghan methods, whilst Masson, who was more or less behind the scenes, was in no position to act as prompter to him. It was just preceding and during the momentous period of the first Afghan war (1839-41) that European explorers in Afghanistan and Baluchistan were most active. Long before then both countries had been an open book to the Ancients, and both may be said geographically to be an open book to us now. There are, however, certain pages which have not yet been properly read, and something will be said later on as to where these pages occur.

CONTENTS

LIST OF MAPS

OROGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFGHANISTAN & BALUCHISTAN
COMPILED BY SIR THOMAS H. HOLDICH, K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., C.B.
[View larger image]

INTRODUCTION

Since the gates of India have become water gates and the way to India has been the way of the sea, very little has been known of those other landward gates which lie to the north and west of the peninsula, through which have poured immigrants from Asia and conquerors from the West from time immemorial. It has taken England a long time to rediscover them, and she is even now doubtful about their strategic value and the possibility of keeping them closed and barred. It is only by an examination of the historical records which concern them, and the geographical conditions which surround them, that any clear appreciation of their value can be attained; and it is only within the last century that such examinations have been rendered possible by the enterprise and activity of a race of explorers (official and otherwise) who have risked their lives in the dangerous field of the Indian trans-frontier. In ancient days the very first (and sometimes the last) thing that was learned about India was the way thither from the North. In our times the process has been reversed, and we seek for information with our backs to the South. We have worked our way northward, having entered India by the southern water gates, and as we have from time to time struggled rather to remain content within narrow borders than to push outward and forward, the drift to the north has been very slow, and there has never been, right from the very beginning, any strenuous haste in the expansion of commercial interests, or any spirit of crusade in the advance of Conquest.

So late as the early years of the sixteenth century England was but a poor country, with less inhabitants than are now crowded within the London area. There was not much to spare, either of money or men, for ventures which could only be regarded in those days as sheer gambling speculations. The splendid records of a successful voyage must have been greatly discounted by the many dismal tales of failure, and nothing but an indomitable impulse, bred of international rivalry, could have led the royal personages and the few wealthy citizens who backed our earliest enterprises to open their purse-strings sufficiently wide to find the necessary means for the equipment of a modest little fleet of square-sailed merchant ships. National tenacity prevailed, however, in the end. The hard-headed Islander finally succeeded where the more impetuous Southerner failed, and England came out finally with most of the honours of a long commercial contest. It was in this way that we reached India, and by degrees we painted India our own conventional colour in patches large enough to give us the preponderating voice in her general administration. But as we progressed northward and north-westward we realized the important fact that India—the peninsula India—was insulated and protected by geographical conformations which formed a natural barrier against outside influences, almost as impassable as the sea barriers of England. On the north-east a vast wilderness of forest-covered mountain ranges and deep lateral valleys barred the way most effectually against irruption from the yellow races of Asia. On the north where the curving serrated ramparts of the north-east gave place to the Himalayan barrier, the huge uplifted highlands of Tibet were equally impassable to the busy pushing hordes of the Mongol; and it was only on the extreme north-west about the hinterland of Kashmir, and beyond the Himalayan system, that any weakness could be found in the chain of defensive works which Nature had sent to the north of India. Here, indeed, in the trans-Indus regions of Kashmir, sterile, rugged, cold, and crowned with gigantic ice-clad peaks, there is a slippery track reaching northward into the depression of Chinese Turkestan, which for all time has been a recognised route connecting India with High Asia. It is called the Karakoram route. Mile upon mile a white thread of a road stretches across the stone-strewn plains, bordered by the bones of the innumerable victims to the long fatigue of a burdensome and ill-fed existence—the ghastly debris of former caravans. It is perhaps the ugliest track to call a trade route in the whole wide world. Not a tree, not a shrub, exists, not even the cold dead beauty which a snow-sheet imparts to highland scenery, for there is no great snowfall in the elevated spaces which back the Himalayas and their offshoots. It is marked, too, by many a sordid tragedy of murder and robbery, but it is nevertheless one of the northern gates of India which we have spent much to preserve, and it does actually serve a very important purpose in the commercial economy of India. At least one army has traversed this route from the north with the prospect before it of conquering Tibet; but it was a Mongol army, and it was worsted in a most unequal contest with Nature.

India (if we include Kashmir) runs to a northern apex about the point where, from the western extension of the giant Muztagh, the Hindu Kush system takes off in continuation of the great Asiatic divide. Here the Pamirs border Kashmir, and here there are also mountain ways which have aforetime let in the irrepressible Chinaman, probably as far as Hunza, but still a very long way from the Indian peninsula. Then the Hindu Kush slopes off to the south-westward and becomes the divide between Afghanistan and Kashmir for a space, till, from north of Chitral, it continues with a sweep right into Central Afghanistan and merges into the mountain chain which reaches to Herat. From this point, north of Chitral, commences the true north-west barrier of India, a barrier which includes nearly the whole width of Afghanistan beyond the formidable wall of the trans-Indus mountains. It is here that the gates of India are to be found, and it is with this outermost region of India, and what lies beyond it, that this book is chiefly concerned.

As the history of India under British occupation grew and expanded and the painting red process gradually developed, whilst men were ever reaching north-westward with their eyes set on these frontier hills, the countries which lay beyond came to be regarded as the "ultima thule" of Indian exploration, and Afghanistan and Baluchistan were reckoned in English as the hinterland of India, only to be reached by the efforts of English adventurers from the plains of the peninsula. And that is the way in which those countries are still regarded. It is Afghanistan in its relations to India, political, commercial, or strategic, as the case may be, that fills the minds of our soldiers and statesmen of to-day; and the way to Afghanistan is still by the way of ships—across the ocean first, and then by climbing upward from the plains of India to the continental plateau land of Asia. It was not so twenty-five centuries ago. One can imagine the laughter that would echo through the courts and palaces of Nineveh at the idea of reaching Afghanistan by a sea route! Think of Tiglath Pilesur, the founder of the Second Assyrian Empire, seated, curled, and anointed, surrounded by his Court and flanked by the sculptured art of his period (already losing some of the freshness and vigour of First Empire design) in the pillared halls of Nineveh, and counting the value of his Eastern satrapies in Sagartia, Ariana, and Arachosia, with outlying provinces in Northern India, whilst meditating yet further conquests to add to his almost illimitable Empire! No shadow of Babylon had stretched northward then. No premonition of a yet larger and later Empire overshadowed him or his successors, Shalmaneser and Sargon. Northern Afghanistan was to these Assyrian kings the dumping ground of unconsidered companies of conquered slaves, a bourne from whence no captive was ever likely to return. No record is left of the passing of those bands of colonists from West to East. We can only gather from the writings of subsequent historians in classical times that for centuries they must have drifted eastward from Syria, Armenia, and Greece, carrying with them the rudiments of the arts and industries of the land they had left for ever, and providing India with the germs of an art system entirely imitative in design, colour, and relief. The Aryan was before them in India. Already the foundations were laid for historic dynasties, and Rajput families were dating their origin from the sun and moon, whilst somewhere from beneath the shadow of the Himalayas in the foothills of Nipal was soon to arise the daystar of a new faith, a "light of Asia" for all centuries to come.

It is impossible to set a limit to the number and variety of the people who, in these early centuries, either migrated, or were deported, from West to East through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or who drifted southwards into Baluchistan. Not until the ethnography of these frontier lands of India is exhaustively studied shall we be able to unravel the influence of Assyrian, Median, Persian, Arab, or Greek migrations in the strange conglomeration of humanity which peoples those countries. Baktra (Balkh), in Northern Afghanistan, must have been a city of consequence in days when Nineveh was young. Farah, a city of Arachosia in Western Afghanistan on the borders of Seistan, must have been a centre from whence Assyrian arts and industries were passed on to India for ages; for Farah lies directly on the route which connects Seistan with the southern passes into the Indus valley. The Indus itself seems to have been the boundary which limited the efforts of migration and exploration. Beyond the Indus were deserts in the south and wide unproductive plains of the Punjab in the north, and it is the deserts of the world's geography which, far more than any other feature, have always determined the extent of the human tidal waves and influenced their direction. They are as the promontories and capes of the world's land perimeter to the tides of the ocean. Beyond these parched and waterless tracts, where now the maximum temperatures of sun-heat in India are registered, were vague uncertainties and mythical wonders, the tales of which in ancient literature are in strange contrast to the exact information which was obtained of geographical conditions and tribal distributions in the basins of the Kabul or Swat rivers, or within the narrow valleys of Makran.

A recent writer (Mr. Ellsworth Huntington) has expressed in picturesque and convincing language the nature of the relationship which has ever existed between man and his physical environments in Asia, and has illustrated the effect of certain pulsations of climate in the movement of Asiatic history. The changing conditions of the climate of High Asia, periods of desiccation and deprivation of natural water-supply alternating with periods of cold and rainfall, acting in slow progression through centuries and never ceasing in their operation, have set "men in nations" moving over the face of that continent since the beginning of time, and left a legacy of buried history, to be unearthed by explorers of the type of Stein, such as will eventually give us the key to many important problems in race distribution. But more important even than climatic influence is the direct influence of physical geography, the actual shaping of mountain and valley, as a factor in directing the footsteps of early migration. Nowadays men cross the seas in thousands from continent to continent, but in the days of Egyptian and Assyrian empire it was that straight high-road which crossed the fewest passes and tapped the best natural resources of wood and water which was absolutely the determining factor in the direction of the great human processions; and although change of climate may have set the nomadic peoples of High Asia moving with a purpose more extensive than an annual search for pasturage, and have led to the peopling of India with successive nations of Central Asiatic origin, it was the knowledge that by certain routes between Mesopotamia and Northern Afghanistan lay no inhospitable desert, and no impassable mountain barrier, that determined the intermittent flow from the west, which received fresh impulse with every conquest achieved, with every band of captives available for colonizing distant satrapies. To put it shortly, there was an easy high-road from Mesopotamia through Persia to Northern Afghanistan, or even to Seistan, and not a very difficult one to Makran; and so it came about that migratory movements, either compulsory or voluntary, continued through centuries, ever extending their scope till checked by the deserts of the Indian frontier or the highlands of the Pamirs and Tibet, or the cold wild wastes of Siberia.

Thus Afghanistan and Baluchistan, the countries with which we are more immediately concerned, were probably far better known to Assyrian and Persian kings than they were to the British Intelligence Office (or its equivalent) of a century ago. The first landward explorations of these countries are lost in pre-historic mists, but we find that the first scientific mission of which we have any record (that which was led by Alexander the Great) was well supplied with fairly accurate geographical information regarding the main route to be followed and the main objectives to be gained.

In tracing out, therefore, or rather in sketching, the gradual progress of exploration in Afghanistan and Baluchistan, and the gradual evolution of those countries into a proper appanage of British India, we will begin (as history began) from the north and west rather than from the south and the plains of Hindustan.

CHAPTER I

EARLY RELATIONS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST. GREECE AND PERSIA AND EARLY TRIBAL DISTRIBUTIONS ON THE INDIAN FRONTIER.

It is unfortunately most difficult to trace the conditions under which Europe was first introduced to Asia, or the gradual ripening of early acquaintance into inter-commercial relationship. Although the eastern world was possessed of a sound literature in the time of Moses, and although long before the days of Solomon there was "no end" to the "making of books," it is remarkable how little has been left of these archaic records, and it is only by inference gathered from tags and ends of oriental script that we gradually realize how unimportant to old-world thinkers was the daily course of their own national history. India is full of ancient literature, but there is no ancient history. To the Brahmans there was no need for it. To them the world and all that it contains was "illusion," and it was worse than idle—it was impious—to perpetuate the record of its varied phases as they appeared to pass in unreal pageantry before their eyes. We know that from under the veil of extravagant epic a certain amount of historical truth has been dragged into daylight. The "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana" contain in allegorical outline the story of early conflicts which ended in the foundation of mighty Rajput houses, or which established the distribution of various races of the Indian peninsula. Without an intimate knowledge of the language in which these great epics are written it is impossible to estimate fully the nature of the allegory which overlies an interesting historical record, but it has always appeared to be sufficiently vague to warrant some uncertainty as to the accuracy of the deductions which have hitherto been evolved therefrom. Nevertheless it is from these early poems of the East that we derive all that there is to be known about ancient India, and when we turn from the East to the West strangely enough we find much the same early literary conditions confronting us.

About 950 years before Christ, two of the most perfect epic poems were written that ever delighted the world, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. The first begins with Achilles and ends with the funeral of Hector. The second recounts the voyages and adventures of Ulysses after the destruction of Troy. With our modern intimate knowledge of the coasts of the Mediterranean it is not difficult to detect, amidst the fabulous accounts of heroic adventures, many references to geographical facts which must have been known generally to the Greeks of the Homeric period, dealing chiefly with the coasts and islands of the Western sea. There is but little reference to the East, although many centuries before Homer's day there was a sea-going trade between India and the West which brought ivory, apes, and peacocks to the ports of Syria. The obvious inference to be derived from the general absence of reference to the mysteries of Eastern geography is that there was no through traffic. Ships from the East traded only along the coast-lines that they knew, and ventured no farther than the point where an interchange of commodities could be established with the slow crawling craft of the West, the navigation of the period being confined to hugging the coast-line and making for the nearest shelter when times were bad. The interchange of commodities between the rough sailor people of those days did not tend to an interchange of geographical information. Probably the language difficulty stood in the way. If there was no end to the making of books it was not the illiterate and rough sailor men who made them. Nor do sailors, as a rule, make them now. It is left to the intelligent traveller uninterested in trade, and the journalistic seeker after sensation, to make modern geographical records; and there were no such travellers in the days of Homer, even if the art of writing had been a general accomplishment. In days much later than Homer we can detect sailors' yarns embodied in what purport to be authentic geographical records, but none so early. We have a reference to certain Skythic nomads who lived on mare's milk, and who had wandered from the Asiatic highlands into the regions north of the Euxine, which is in itself deeply interesting as it indicates that as early as the ninth century B.C. Milesian Greek colonies had started settlements on the shores of the Black Sea. As the centuries rolled on these settlements expanded into powerful colonies, and with enterprising people such as the early Greeks there can be little doubt that there was an intermittent interchange of commerce with the tribes beyond the Euxine, and that gradually a considerable, if inaccurate, knowledge of Asia, even beyond the Taurus, was acquired. The world, for them, was still a flat circular disc with a broad tidal ocean flowing around its edge, encompassing the habitable portions about the centre.

Africa extended southward to the land of Ethiop and no farther, but Asia was a recognised geographical entity, less vague and nebulous even than the western isles from whence the Phœnicians brought their tin. There were certain fables current among the Greeks touching the one-eyed Arimaspians, the gold-guarding griffins, and the Hyperboreans, which in the middle of the sixth century were still credited, and almost indicate an indefinite geographical conception of northern Asiatic regions. But it is probable that much more was known of Asiatic geography in these early years than can be gathered from the poems and fables of Greek writers before the days of Herodotus and of professional geography. There were no means of recording knowledge ready to the hand of the colonist and commercial traveller then; even the few literary men who later travelled for the sake of gaining knowledge were dependent largely on information obtained scantily and with difficulty from others, and the expression of their knowledge is crude and imperfect. But what should we expect even in present times if we proceeded to compile a geographical treatise from the works of Milton and Shakespere? What indeed would be the result of a careful analysis of parliamentary utterances on geographical subjects within, say, the last half century? Would they present to future generations anything approaching to an accurate epitome of the knowledge really possessed (though possibly not expressed) by those who have within that period almost exhausted the world's store of geographical record? The analogy is a perfectly fair one. Geographers and explorers are not always writers even in these days, and as we work backwards into the archives of history nothing is more astonishing than the indications which may be found of vast stores of accurate information of the earth's physiography lost to the world for want of expression.

It was between the sixth century B.C. and the days of Herodotus that Miletus was destroyed, and captive Greeks were transported by Darius Hystaspes from the Lybian Barké to Baktria, where we find traces of them again under their original Greek name in the northern regions of Afghanistan. It was long ere the days of Darius that the hosts of Assyria beat down the walls of Samaria and scattered the remnants of Israel through the highlands of Western Asia. Where did they drift to, these ten despairing tribes? Possibly we may find something to remind us of them also in the northern Afghan hills.

It was probably about the same era that some pre-Hellenic race, led (so it is written) by the mythical hero Dionysos, trod the weary route from the Euxine to the Caspian, and from the southern shores of the Caspian to the borderland of modern Indian frontier, where their descendants welcomed Alexander on his arrival as men of his own faith and kin, and were recognised as such by the great conqueror. Now all this points to an acquaintance with the geographical links between East and West which appears nowhere in any written record. Nowhere can we find any clear statement of the actual routes by which these pilgrims were supposed to have made their long and toilsome journeys. Just the bare facts are recorded, and we are left to guess the means by which they were accomplished. But it is clear that the old-world overland connection between India and the Black Sea is a very old connection indeed, and further, it is clear that what the Greeks may not have known the Persians certainly did know. When Herodotus first set solidly to work on a geographical treatise which was to embrace the existing knowledge of the whole world, he undoubtedly derived a great deal of that knowledge from official Persian sources; and it may be added that the early Persian department for geographical intelligence has been proved by this last century's scientific investigations to have collected information of which the accuracy is certainly astonishing. It is only quite recently, during the process of surveys carried on by the Government of India through the highlands and coast regions of Baluchistan and Eastern Persia, that anything like a modern gazetteer of the tribes occupying those districts has been rendered possible. Twenty-five years ago our military information concerning ethnographic distributions in districts lying immediately beyond the north-western frontier was no better than that which is contained in the lists of the Persian satrapies, given to the world by Herodotus nearly 500 years before the Christian era. Twenty-five years ago we did not know of the existence of some of the tribes and peoples mentioned by him, and we were unable to identify others. Now, however, we are at last aware that through twenty-four centuries most of them have clung to their old habitat in a part of the Eastern world where material wealth and climatic attractions have never been sufficient to lead to annihilation by conquest. Oppressed and harried by successive Persian dynasties, overrun by the floatsam and jetsam of hosts of migratory Asiatic peoples from the North, those tribes have mostly survived to bear a much more valuable testimony to the knowledge of the East entertained by the West in the days of Herodotus than any which can be gathered from written documents.

The Milesian colonies founded on the southern and western shores of the Euxine in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., whilst retaining their trade connection with the parent city of Miletus (where sprang that carpet-making industry for which this corner of Asia has been famous ever since), found no open road to the further eastern trade through the mountain regions that lie south of the Black Sea. Half a century after Herodotus we find Xenophon struggling in almost helpless entanglement amongst these wild mountains comparatively close to the Greek colonies; and it was there that he encountered the fiercest opposition from the native tribes-people that he met with during his famous retreat from Persia. It is always so. Our most active opponents on the Indian frontier are the mountaineers of the immediate borderland—the people who know us best, and therefore fear us most. It was chiefly through Miletus and the Cilician gates that Greek trade with Persia and Babylon was maintained. There were no Greek colonies on the rugged eastern coasts of the Black Sea—sufficient indication that no open trade route existed direct to the Caspian by any line analogous to that of the modern railway that connects Batum with Baku. On the north of the Euxine, however, there were great and flourishing colonies (of which Olbia at the mouth of the Borysthenes, or Dnieper, was the most famous) which undoubtedly traded with the Skythic peoples north and west of the Caspian. From these sources came the legends of Hyperboreans and Griffins and other similar tales, all flavoured with the glamour of northern mystery, but none of them pointing to an eastern origin. Recent investigations into the ethnography of certain tribes in Afghanistan, however, seem to prove conclusively that even if there was no recognised trade between Greece and India before Miletus was destroyed by Darius Hystaspes, and Greek settlers were transported by the Persian conqueror to the borders of the modern Badakshan, yet there must have been Greek pioneers in colonial enterprise who had made their way to the Far East and stayed there. For instance, we have that strange record of settlements under Dionysos amongst the spurs and foothills of the Hindu Kush, which were clearly of Greek origin, although Arrian in his history of Alexander's progress through Asia is unable to explain the meaning of them.

There is more to be said about these settlements later. The first actual record of settlement of Greeks in Baktria is that of Herodotus, to which we have referred as being affected by Darius Hystaspes in the sixth century before Christ, and the descendants of these settlers are undoubtedly the people referred to by Arrian as "Kyreneans", who could be no other than the Greek captives from the Lybian Barke. Their existence two centuries later than Herodotus is attested by Arrian, and they were apparently in possession of the Kaoshan pass over the Hindu Kush at the time of Alexander's expedition. Another body of Greeks is recorded by Arrian to have been settled in the Baktrian country by Xerxes after his flight from Greece. These were the Brankhidai of Milesia, whose posterity are said to have been exterminated by Alexander in punishment for the crimes of their grandfather Didymus. The name Barang, or Farang, is frequently repeated in the mountain districts of Northern Afghanistan and Badakshan, and careful inquiry would no doubt reveal the fact that surviving Greek affinities are still far more widely spread through that part of Asia than is generally known. All these settlements were antecedent to Alexander, but beyond these recorded instances of Greek occupation there can be little doubt that (as pointed out by Bellew in his Ethnography of Afghanistan and supported by later observations) the Greek element had been diffused through the wide extent of the Persian sovereignty for centuries before the birth of Alexander the Great. It is probable that each of the four great divisions of the ancient Greeks had contributed for a thousand years before to the establishment of colonies in Asia Minor, and from these colonies bands of emigrants had penetrated to the far east of the Persian dominions, either as free men or captives. Amongst the clans and tribal sections of Afghans and Pathans are to be found to this day names that are clearly indicative of this pre-historic Greek connection.

Persia at her greatest maintained a considerable overland trade with India, and Indian tribute formed a large part of her revenues. All Afghanistan was Persian; all Baluchistan, and the Indian frontier to the Indus. The underlying Persian element is strong in all these regions still, the dominant language of the country, the speech of the people, whether Baluch or Pathan, is of Persian stock, whilst the polite tongue of Court officials, if not the Persian of Tehran or Shiraz, is at least an imitation of it. It is hardly strange that the Greek language should have absolutely disappeared. We have the statement of Seneca (referred to by Bellew in his Inquiry) that the Greek language was spoken in the Indus valley as late as the middle of the first century after Christ; "if indeed it did not continue to be the colloquial in some parts of the valley to a considerably later period." As this is nearly two centuries after the overthrow of Greek dominion in Afghanistan, it at least indicates that the Greek settlements established four centuries earlier must have continued to exist, and to be reinforced by Greek women (for children speak their mother's tongue) to a comparatively late period; and that the triumph of the Jat over the Greek did not by any means efface the influence of the Greek in India for centuries after it occurred. It is probable that when the importation of Greek women (who were often employed in the households of Indian chiefs and nobles at a time when Greek ladies married Indian Princes) ceased, then the Greek language ceased to exist also. The retinue and followers of Alexander's expedition took the women of the country to wife, and it is not, as is so often supposed, to the results of that expedition so much as to the long existence of Greek colonies and settlements that we must attribute the undoubted influence of Greek art on the early art of India.

Thus we have a wide field before us for inquiry into the early history of ethnographical movement in Asia, as it affected the relation between Europe and Afghanistan. Afghanistan (which is a modern political development) has ever held the landward gates of India. We cannot understand India without a study of that wide hinterland (Afghan, Persian, and Baluch) through which the great restless human tide has ever been on the move: now a weeping nation of captives led by tear-sodden routes to a land of exile; now a band of merchants reaching forward to the land of golden promise; or perchance an army of pilgrims marching with their feet treading deep into narrow footways to the shrines of forgotten saints; or perchance an armed host seeking an uncertain fate; a ceaseless, waveless tide, as persistent, as enterprising, and infinitely more complicated in its developments than the process of modern emigration, albeit modern emigration may spread more widely.

Living as we do in fixed habitations and hedged in not merely by narrow seas but by the conventionalities of civilized existence, we fail to realize the conditions of nomadic life which were so familiar to our Asiatic ancestors. Something of its nature may be gathered to-day from the Kalmuk and Kirghiz nomads of Central Asia. A day's march is not a day's march to them—it is a day's normal occupation. The yearly shift in search of fresh pasture is not a flitting on a holiday tour; it is as much a part of the year's life as the change of raiment between summer to winter. Everything moves; the home is not left behind; every man, woman, and child of the family has a recognised share in the general shift. Perhaps that of the Kirghiz man is the easiest. He smokes a lazy pipe in the bright sunshine and watches his boys strip off the felt covering of his wicker-built "kibitka," whilst his wife with floating bands of her white headdress fluttering in the breeze, and her quilted coat turned up to give more freedom to her booted legs, gets together the household traps in compact bundles for the great hairy camel to carry. Her efforts are not inartistic; long experience has taught her exactly where every household god can be stowed to the best advantage. Meanwhile the happy, good-looking Kirghiz girls are racing over the grass country after sheep, and ere long the little party is making its slow but sure way over the breezy steppes to the passes of the blue mountains, which look down from afar on to the warmer plains. And who has the best of it? The free-roving, untrammelled child of the plain, quite godless, and taking no thought for the morrow, or the carefully cultured and tight-fitted product of civilization to whom the motor and the railway represent the only thinkable method of progression? That, however, is not the point. What we wish to emphasize is the apparent inability on the part of many writers on the subject of ancient history and geography to realize the essential difference between then and now as regards human migratory movement.

There is often an apparent misconception that there is more movement in these days of railways and steamers and motors than existed ten centuries before Christ. The difference lies not in the comparative amount of movement but in the method of it. In one sense only is there more movement—there are more people to travel; but in a broader sense there is much less movement. Whole nations are no longer shifted at the will of the conqueror across a continent, trade seekers no longer devote their lives to the personal conduct of caravans; armies swelled to prodigious size by a tagrag following no longer (except in China) move slowly over the face of the land, devouring, like a swarm of locusts, all that comes in their way. Colonial emigration perhaps alone works on a larger scale now than in those early times; but taking it "bye and large," the circulation of the human race, unrestricted by political boundaries, was certainly more constant in the unsettled days of nomadic existence than in these later days of overgrown cities and electric traffic. If little or nothing is recorded of many of the most important migrations which have changed the ethnographic conditions of Asia, whilst at the same time we have volumes of ancient philosophy and mythology, it is because such changes were regarded as normal, and the current of contemporary history as an ephemeral phenomenon not worth the labour of close inquiry or a manuscript record.

Such a gazetteer as that presented to us by Herodotus would not have been possible had there not been free and frequent access to the countries and the people with whom it deals. It is impossible to conceive that so much accuracy of detail could have been acquired without the assistance of personal inquiry on the spot. If this is so, then the Persians at any rate knew their way well about Asia as far east as Tibet and India, and the Greeks undoubtedly derived their knowledge from Persia. When Alexander of Macedon first planned his expedition to Central Asia he had probably more certain knowledge of the way thither than Lord Napier of Magdala possessed when he set out to find the capital of Theodore's kingdom in Abyssinia, and it is most interesting to note the information which was possessed by the Greek authorities a century and a half before Alexander's time.

One notable occurrence pointing to a fairly comprehensive knowledge of geography of the Indian border by the Persians, was the voyage of the Greek Scylax of Caryanda down the Indus, and from its mouth to the Arabian Gulf, which was regarded by Herodotus as establishing the fact of a continuous sea. This voyage, or mission, which was undertaken by order of Darius who wished to know where the Indus had its outlet and "sent some ships" on a voyage of discovery, is most instructive. It is true that the accounts of it are most meagre, but such details as are given establish beyond a doubt that the expedition was practical and real. The Persian dominions then extended to the Indus, but there is no evidence that they ever extended beyond that river into the peninsula of India. The Indus of the Persian age was not the Indus of to-day, and its outlet to the sea presumably did not differ materially from that of the subsequent days of Alexander and Nearkos. Thanks to the careful investigations of the Bombay Survey Department, and the close attention which has been given to ancient landmarks by General Haig during the progress of his surveys, we know pretty certainly where the course of the Lower Indus must have been, and where both Scylax and Nearkos emerged into the Arabian Sea. The Indus delta of to-day covers an area of 10,000 square miles with 125 miles of coast-line, and it presents to us a huge alluvial tract which is everywhere furrowed by ancient river channels. Some of these are continuous through the delta, and can be traced far above it; others are traceable for only short distances. Without entering into details of the rate of progression in the formation of Delta (which can be gathered not only from the abandoned sites of towns once known as coast ports, but from actual observation from year to year), it may be safely assumed that the Indus of Alexander and Scylax emptied itself into the Ran of Kach, far to the south of its present debouchment. The volume of its waters was then augmented by at least one important river (the Saraswati), which, flowing from the Himalayas through what is now known as the Rajputana desert, was the source of widespread wealth and fertility to thousands of square miles where now there is nothing to be met with but sandy waste. As far as the Indus the Persian Empire is known to have extended, but no farther; and it was important to the military advisers of Darius that something should be known of the character of this boundary river.

Wherever the ships sent by Darius may have gone it is quite clear that they did not sail up the Indus, or there would have been no objective for an expedition which was organised to determine where the Indus met the sea by the process of sailing down that river. Moreover, the voyage up the Indus would have been tedious and slow, and could only have been undertaken in the cold weather with the assistance of native pilots acquainted with the ever-shifting bed of the river, which, so far as its liability to change of channel is concerned, must have been much the same in the days of Darius as it is at present. The possibility, therefore, is that Scylax made his way to the Upper Indus overland, for we are told that the expedition started from the city of Carpatyra in the Pactyan country. This in itself is exceedingly instructive, indicating that the Pactyans, or Pathans, or Pukhtu speaking peoples have occupied the districts of the Upper Indus for four-and-twenty centuries at least; and coincident with them we learn that the Aprytæ or Afridi shared the honour of being resident landowners. Nor need we suppose that the beginning of this history was the beginning of their existence. The Afridi may have rejoiced in his native hills ten or twenty centuries before he was written about by Herodotus. We need not stay to identify the site of Carpatyra. The Upper Indus valley is full of ancient sites. A century and a half later Taxilla was the recognized capital of the Upper Punjab, and Carpatyra meanwhile may have disappeared. Anyhow we hear of Carpatyra no more, nor has the ingenuity of modern research thrown any certain light on its position. It is, however, probably near Attok that we must look for it. Scylax made his way down the Indus in native craft that from long before his day to the present have retained their primitive form, a form which was not unlike that of the coast crawling "ships" of Darius. He proved the existence of an open water-way from the Upper Punjab to the Persian Gulf, and incidentally his expedition shows us that the chief lines of communication through the width of the Persian Empire were well known, and that the road from Susa to the Upper Indus was open. The outlying satrapies of the Persian Empire could never have been added one by one to that mighty power without definite knowledge of the way to reach them. It was not merely a spasmodic expedition, such as that of Scylax, which pointed the way to the conquests of the Far East; it was the gathered information of years of experience, and it was on the basis of this experience (unwritten and unrecorded so far as we know) that Alexander founded his plans of campaign.

The detailed list of peoples included in the satrapies of the Persian Empire, whilst it is more ethnographical than geographical in its character, is sufficient proof in itself of the existence of constant movement between Persia and the borderland of Afghanistan, which assuredly included commercial traffic. This enumeration has been compared with a catalogue of tribal contingents which swelled the great army of Xerxes, an independent statement, and therefore a valuable test to the general accuracy of Herodotus; and it is still further confirmed by the list of nations subject to the Persian king found in the inscriptions of Darius at Behistan and Persepolis. We are not immediately concerned with the satrapies included in Western Asia and Egypt, but when Herodotus makes a sudden departure from his rule of geographical sequence and introduces a satrapy on the remotest east of the Persian Empire, we immediately recognize that he touches the Indian frontier.

The second satrapy most probably corresponds with that part of Central Afghanistan south of the Kabul River, which lies west of the Suliman Hills and north of the Kwaja Amran or Khojak. Every name mentioned by Herodotus certainly has its counterpart in one or other of the tribes to be found there to this day, excepting the Lydoi (whose history as Ludi is fairly well known) and the Lasonoi, who have emigrated, the former into India and the latter to Baluchistan.

The seventh satrapy, again, comprised the Sattagydai, the Gandarioi, the Dadikai, and the Aparytai ("joined together"), an association of names too remarkable to be mistaken. The Sattag or Khattak, the Gandhari, the Dadi, and the Afridi are all trans-Indus people, and without insisting too strongly on the exact habitat of each, originally there can be little doubt that the seventh satrapy included a great part of the Indus valley.

The eleventh satrapy is also probably a district of the Indian trans-frontier, although Bunbury associates the name Kaspioi with the Caspian Sea. It is far more likely that the Kaspioi of Herodotus are to be recognized as the people of the ancient Kaspira or Kasmira, and the Daritæ as the Daraddesa (Dards) of the contiguous mountains. All Kashmir, even to the borders of Tibet (whence came the story of the gold-digging ants), was well enough known to the Persians and through them to Herodotus.

The twelfth satrapy comprised Balkh and Badakshan—what is now known as Afghan Turkistan. It was here that, generations before Alexander's campaign, those Greek settlements were founded by Darius and Xerxes which have left to this day living traces of their existence in the places originally allotted to them. In Afghan Turkistan also was founded the centre of Greek dominion in this part of Asia after the conquest of Persia, and it is impossible to avoid the conviction that there was a connection between these two events. The Greeks took the country from the Bakhi; but there are no people of this name left in these provinces now. They may (as Bellew suggests) be recognized again in the Bakhtyari of Southern Persia, but it seems unlikely; and it is far more probable that they were obliterated by Alexander as his most active opponents after he passed Aria (Herat) and Drangia (Seistan).

The sixteenth satrapy was north of the Oxus, and included Sogdia and Aria (Herat). South of Aria was the fourteenth satrapy, represented by Seistan and Western Makran, with "the islands of the sea in which the King settles transported convicts"; and east of this again was the seventeenth satrapy covering Southern Baluchistan and Eastern Makran. It is only during the last twenty-five years that an accurate geographical knowledge of these uninviting regions has been attained. The gradual extension of the red line of the Indian border, with the necessity for preserving peace and security, has gradually enveloped Makran and Persian Baluchistan, the Gadrosia and Karmania of the Greeks, and has brought to light many strange secrets which have been dormant (for they were no secrets to the traveller of the Middle Ages) for a few centuries prior to the arrival of the British flag in Western India. It is an inhospitable country which is thus included. "Mostly desert," as one ancient writer says; marvellously furrowed and partitioned by bands of sun-scorched rocky hills, all narrow and sharp where they follow each other in parallel waves facing the Arabian Sea, or massed into enormous square-faced blocks of impassable mountain barrier whenever the uniform regularity of structure is lost. And yet it is a country full not only of interest historical and ethnographical, such as might be expected of the environment of a series of narrow passages leading to the western gates of India, but of incident also. There are amongst these strange knife-backed volcanic ridges and scarped clay hills valleys of great beauty, where the date-palms mass their feathery heads into a forest of green, and below them the fertile soil is moist and lush with cultured vegetation. But we have described elsewhere this strangely mixed land, and we have now only to deal with the aspect of it as known to the Greeks before the days of Alexander. That knowledge was ethnographical in its quality and exceedingly slight in quantity. Herodotus mentions the Sagartoi, Zarangai, Thamanai, Uxoi, and Mykoi. These are Seistan tribes. The Sagartoi were nomads of Seistan, mentioned both amongst tribes paying tribute and those who were exempt. The Zarangai were the inhabitants of Drangia (Seistan), where their ancient capital fills one of the most remarkable of all historic sites. The Zarangai are said to be recognizable in the Afghan Durani. No Afghan Durani would admit this. He claims a very different origin (as will be explained), and in the absence of authoritative history it is never wise to set aside the traditions of a people about themselves, especially of a people so advanced as the Duranis. More probable is it that the ancient geographical appellation Zarangai covers the historic Kaiani of Seistan supposed to be the same as the Kakaya of Sanscrit.

The Uxoi may be the modern Hots of Makran—a people who are traditionally reckoned amongst the most ancient of the mixed population which has drifted into the Makran ethnographic cul-de-sac, and who were certainly there in Alexander's time. In eastern Makran, Herodotus mentions only the Parikanoi and the Asiatic Ethiopian. Parikan is the Persian plural form of the Sanscrit Parva-ka, which means "mountaineer." This bears exactly the same meaning as the word Kohistani, or Barohi, and is not a tribal appellation at all, although the latter may possibly have developed into the Brahui, the well-known name of a very important Dravidian people of Southern Baluchistan (highlanders all of them) who are akin to the Dravidian races of Southern India. The Asiatic Ethiopian presents a more difficult problem. During the winter of 1905 careful inquiries were made in Makran for any evidence to support the suggestion that a tribe of Kushite origin still existed in that country. It is of interest in connection with the question whether the earliest immigrants into Mesopotamia (these people who, according to Accadian tradition, brought with them from the South the science of civilization) were a Semitic race or Kushites. It is impossible to ignore the existence of Kushite races in the east as well as the south. We have not only the authority of the earliest Greek writings, but Biblical records also are in support of the fact, and modern interest only centres in the question what has become of them. Bellew suggests that it was after the various Kush or Kach, or Kaj tribes that certain districts in Baluchistan are called Kach Gandava or Kach (Kaj) Makran, and that the chief of these tribes were the Gadara, after whom the country was called Gadrosia. This seems mere conjecture. At any rate the term Kach, sometimes Kachchi, sometimes Katz, is invariably applied to a flat open space, even if it is only the flat terrace above a river intervening between the river and a hill, and is purely geographical in its significance. But it was a matter of interest to discover whether the Gadurs of Las Bela could be the Gadrosii, or whether they exhibited any Ethiopian traits. The Gadurs, however, proved to be a section of the Rajput clan of Lumris, a proud race holding themselves aloof from other clans and never intermarrying with them. There could be no mistake about the Rajput origin of the red-skinned Gadur. He was a Kshatrya of the lunar race, but he might very possibly represent the ancient Gadrosii, even though he is no descendant of Kush. The other Rajput tribes with whom the Gadurs coalesce have apparently held their own in Las from a period quite remote, and must have been there when Alexander passed that way.

Asiatic negroes abound in Makran: some of them fresh importations from Africa, others bred in the slave villages of the Arabian Sea coast, as they have been for centuries. They are a fine, brawny, well-developed race of people, and some of the best of them are to be found as stokers in the P. & O. service; but they do not represent the Asiatic Ethiopian of Herodotus, who could hardly compile a gazetteer for the Greeks which should include all the ethnographical information known to the Persians, any more than our Intelligence Department could compile a complete gazetteer of the whole Russian Empire. To the maritime Greek nation the overwhelming preponderance of the huge Empire which overshadowed them must have created the same feeling of anxious suspicion that the unwieldy size of Russia presents to us, and it is not very likely that military intelligence of a really practical nature was offered gratis to the Greeks by the Persian geographers and military leaders. It is not surprising, therefore, that Herodotus did not know all that existed on the far Persian frontier. There are tribes and peoples about Southern Baluchistan who are as ancient as Herodotus but who are not mentioned. For instance, the ruling tribe in Makran until quite recently (when they were ousted by certain Sikh or Rajput interlopers called Gichki) were the Boledi, and their country was once certainly called Boledistan. The Boledi valley is one of the loveliest in a country which is apt to enhance the loveliness of its narrow bands of luxuriance by their rarety and their narrowness. It is a sweet oasis in the midst of a barren rocky sea, and must always have been an object of envy to dwellers outside, even in days when a fuller water-supply, more widely spread, turned many a valley green which is now deep drifted with sand. Ptolemy mentions the Boledis, so that they can well boast the traditional respectability of age-long ancestry. The Boledis are said to have dispossessed the Persian Kaiani Maliks, who ruled Makran in the seventeenth century, when they headed what is known as the Baluch Confederation. This may be veritable history, but their pride of race and origin, on whatever record it is based, has come to an end now; it has been left to the present generation to see the last of them. A few years ago there was living but one representative of the ruling family of the Boledis, an old lady named Miriam, who was exceedingly cunning in the art of embroidery, and made the most bewitching caps. She was, I believe, dependent on the bounty of the Sultan of Muscat, who possesses a small tract of territory on the Makran coast. Herodotus apparently knew nothing about the Boledis, nor can it be doubted that the Greek knowledge of Makran was exceedingly scanty. Thus, whilst Alexander marched to the Indian frontier, well supplied with information as to the ways thither when once he could make Persia his base, he was almost totally ignorant of the one route out of India which he eventually followed, and which so nearly enveloped his whole force in disaster.

CHAPTER II

ASSYRIA AND AFGHANISTAN—ANCIENT LAND ROUTES—POSSIBLE SEA ROUTES

With the building up of the vast Persian Empire, and the gradual fostering of eastern colonies, and the consequent introduction of the manners and methods of Western Asia into the highlands of Samarkand and Badakshan, other nationalities were concerned besides Persians and Greeks. Captive peoples from Syria had been deported to Assyria seven centuries before Christ. The House of Israel had been broken up (for Samaria had fallen in 721 B.C. before the victorious hosts of Sargon), and some of the Israelitish families had been deported eastwards and northwards to Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. With the vitality of their indestructible race it is at least possible that a remnant survived as serfs in Assyria, preserving their own customs and institutions—secretly if not openly—intermarrying, trading, and money-making, yet still looking for the final restoration of Israel until the final break-up of the Assyrian Kingdom. They were never absolutely absorbed, and never forgot to recount their historic pedigree to their children.

With the final overthrow of the Assyrian Kingdom we lose sight of the tribes of Israel, who for more than a century had been mingled with the peoples of Northern Mesopotamia and Armenia. At least history holds no record of their further national existence. From time immemorial in Asia it had been customary for the captives taken in war to be transported bodily to another field for purposes of colonization and public labour. When the world was more scantily peopled such methods were natural and effectual; the increase of working power gained thereby being of the utmost importance in days when enormous irrigation canals were excavated, and bricks had to be fashioned for the construction of walled cities.

The extent and magnificence of Assyrian building must have demanded an immense supply of such manual labour for the purpose of brickmaking. All the mighty works of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon were literally "the work of men's hands." In Mesopotamia was captured labour especially necessary. Stone was indeed available at Nineveh, but the barrenness of the soil which stretches flatly from the rugged hills of Kurdistan across Mesopotamia rendered the country unproductive unless enormous works of irrigation were undertaken for the distribution of water. Mesopotamia is a country of immense possibilities, but the wealth of it is only for those who can distribute the waters of its great rivers over the productive soil. The yearly inundations of the Euphrates and Tigris are but sufficient for the needs of a narrow strip of land on either side the rivers, and the crops of the country undeveloped by canals can only support a scattered and scanty population. Towards the south there is another difficulty. The flat soil becomes water-logged and marshy and runs to waste for want of drainage. There is no stone for building purposes near Babylon. Approaching Babylon over the windy wastes of scrub-powdered plain there is nothing to be seen in the shape of a hill. Long, low, flat-topped mounds stretch athwart the horizon and resolve themselves on nearer approach into deeply scarred and weather-worn accretions of debris, or else they are banks of ancient waterways winding through the steppe, the last remnants of a stupendous system of irrigation. Then there breaks into view the solitary erection which stands in the open plain overlooking a wide vista of marsh and swamp to the west, which represents the ruins called Birs Nimrud, the Ziggurat or temple which, in successive tiers devoted to the powers of heaven, supported the shrine of Mercury. It is by far the most conspicuous object in the Babylonian landscape; huge, dilapidated, and unshapely, it mounts guard over a silent, stagnant, swampy plain.

Now the remarkable feature in all these gigantic remains of antiquity is that they are built of brick. In the wide expanse of Mesopotamia plain around there is not a stone quarry to be found. Of Nineveh, we learn from the masterly records of Xenophon that as he was leading the surviving 10,000 Greeks in their retreat from the disastrous field of Babylon back to the sunny Hellespont, some 200 years after the destruction of Nineveh, he came upon a vast desert city on the Tigris. The wall of it was 25 feet wide, 100 feet high, with a 20-foot basement of stone. This was all that was left of Kalah, one of the Assyrian capitals. A day's march farther north he came on another deserted city with similar walls. These were the dry bones of Nineveh, already forgotten and forsaken. Two centuries had in these early ages been sufficient to blot out the memory of Assyrian greatness so completely that Xenophon knew not of it, nor recognized the place where his foot was treading. Barely seventy years ago was the memory of them restored to man, and tokens of the richness and magnificence of the art which embellished them first given to the world. The mounds representing Nineveh and Babylon are some of them of enormous size. The mound of Mugheir (the ancient Ur) is the ancient platform of an Assyrian palace, which is faced with a wall 10 feet thick of red kiln-dried bricks cemented with bitumen. Some of these platforms were raised from 50 to 60 feet above the plain and protected by massive stone masonry carried to a height exceeding that of the platform. But the Babylonian mound of Birs Nimrud, which rises from the plain level to the blue glazed masonry of the upper tier of the Ziggurat, is altogether a brick construction. The debris of the many-coloured bricks now forms a smooth slope for many feet from its base; but above, where the square blocks of brickwork still hold together in scattered disarray, you may still dig out a foot-square brick with the title and designations of Nebuchadnezzar imprinted on its face. These artificial mounds could only have been built at an enormous cost of labour. The great mound of Koyunjik (the palace of Nineveh) covers an area of 100 acres and reaches up 95 feet at its highest point. It has been calculated that to heap up such a pile would "require the united efforts of 10,000 men for twelve years, or 20,000 men for six years" (Rawlinson, Five Monarchies), and then only the base of the palace is reached; and there are many such mounds, for "it seems to have been a point of honour with the Assyrian Kings that each should build a new palace for himself" (Ragozin, Chaldaea).

Only conquering monarchs with whole nations as prisoners could have compassed such results. This, indeed, was one of the great objectives of war in these early times. It was the amassing of a great population for manual labour and the creation of new centres of civilization and trade. Thus it was that the peoples of Western Asia—Egyptians, Israelites, Jews, Phœnicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and even Greeks—were transported over vast distances by land, and a movement given to the human race in that part of the world which has infinitely complicated the science of ethnology. The peopling of Canada by the French, of North America by the English, of Brazil by the Portuguese, of Argentina and Chile by Spaniards and Italians, is perhaps a more comprehensive process in the distribution of humanity and more permanent in its character. But ancient compulsory movement, if not as extensive as modern voluntary emigration, was at least wholesale, and it led to the distribution of people in districts which would not naturally have invited them. The first process in the consolidation of a district, or satrapy, was the settlement of inhabitants, sometimes in supercession of a displaced or annihilated people, sometimes as an ethnic variety to the possessors of the soil. Tiglath Pileser was the first Assyrian monarch to consolidate the Empire by its division into satrapies. Henceforward the outlying provinces of the dominions were convenient dumping places for such bodies of captives as were not required for public works at home.

Nothing would be more natural than that Sargon should deport a portion of the Israelitish nation to colonize his eastern possessions towards India, just as Darius Hystaspes later employed the same process to the same ends when he deported Greeks from the Lybian Barke to Baktria. There is nothing more astonishing in the fact that we should find a powerful people claiming descent from Israel in Northern Afghanistan than that we should find another people claiming a Greek origin in the Hindu Kush.

Nor was the importance of peopling waste lands and raising up new nations out of well-planted colonies overlooked ten centuries before Christ any more than it is now. Then it was a matter of transporting them overland and on foot to the farthest eastern limits of these great Asiatic empires. Always east or south they tramped, for nothing was known of the geography of the North and West. Eastwards lay the land of the sun, whence came the Indians who fought in the armies of Darius, and where gold and ivory, apes and peacocks were found to fill Phœnician ships. To-day it is different. The peopling of the world with whites is chiefly a Western process. Emigrants go out in ships, not as captives, but almost equally in compact bodies—the best of our working men to Canada, and many of the best of our much-wanted domestic servants to South Africa. It is a perpetual process in the world's economy, and perhaps the chief factor in the world's history; but in the old, old centuries before the Christian era it was necessarily a land process, and the geographical distribution of the land features determined the direction of the human tide. Some twenty years before the fall of Samaria and the deportation of the ten tribes of Israel, Tiglath Pileser had effected conquests in Asia which carried him so far east that he probably touched the Indus. Why he went no farther, or why Alexander subsequently left the greater part of the Indian peninsula unexplored, is fully explicable on natural grounds, even if other explanations were wanting.

The Indus valley would offer to the military explorers from the West the first taste of the quality of the climate of the India of the plains which they would encounter. The Indus valley in the hot weather would possess little climatic attraction for the Western highlander. Alexander's troops mutinied when they got far beyond the Indus. Any other troops would mutiny under such conditions as governed their outfit and their march. It is more than possible that the great Assyrian conqueror before him encountered much the same difficulty. It is clear, however, historically, that the Assyrian knew and trod the way to Northern Afghanistan (or Baktria), and if we examine the map of Asia with any care we shall see that there is no formidable barrier to the passing of large bodies of people from Nineveh to Herat (Aria), or from Herat to the Indus valley, until we reach the very gates of India on the north-west frontier. Four centuries later than Tiglath Pileser the battle of Arbela was fought to a finish between Alexander and Darius (who possessed both Greek and Indian troops in his army) on a field which is not so very far to the east of Nineveh, and which is probably represented more or less accurately by the modern Persian town of Erbil. The modern town may not be on the exact site of the action, and we know that the ancient town was some sixty miles away from the battlefield. However that may be, we learn that in the general retreat of the Persians which followed the battle, Darius made his way to Ecbatana, the ancient capital of the Medes. There he remained for about a year, but hearing of Alexander's advance from Persepolis in the spring of 330 B.C. he fled to the north-east, with a view to taking refuge with his kinsman Bessos, who was then satrap of Baktria. This gives us the clue to the general line of communication between Northern Mesopotamia and Baktria (or Afghanistan) in ancient days; and the twenty-five centuries which have rolled by since that early period have done little to modify that line.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century A.D. from the earliest times with which we can come into contact through any human record, this high-road (not the only one, but the chief one) must have been trodden by the feet of thousands of weary pilgrims, captives, emigrants, merchants, or fighting men—an intermittent tide of humanity exceeding in volume any host known to modern days—bringing East into touch with the West to an extent which we can hardly appreciate. It may be said that the straightest road to Baktria did not lie through Ecbatana. It did not; but independently of the fact that Ecbatana was a city of great defensive capacity, and of reasons both political and military which would have impelled Darius to take that route, we shall find if we examine the latest Survey of India map of Western Persia that the geographical distribution of hill and valley make it the easiest, if not the shortest, route. The configuration of Western Persia, like that of Makran and Southern Baluchistan extending to our own north-west frontier, mainly consists of long lines of narrow ridges curving in lines parallel to the coast, rocky and mostly impassable to travellers crossing their difficult ridge and furrow formation transversely, but presenting curiously easy and open roads along the narrow lateral valleys. Ecbatana once stood where the modern Hamadan now stands. The road from Arbil (or Erbil) that carries most traffic follows this trough formation to Kermanshah and then bends north-eastward to Hamadan. From Hamadan to Rhagai and the Caspian gates, which was the route followed by Darius in his flight from Ecbatana, the road was clearly coincident with the present telegraph line to Tehran from Hamadan, which strikes into the great post route eastward to Mashad and Herat, one of the straightest and most uniformly level roads in all Asia. It must always have been so. Remarkable physical changes have occurred in Asia during these twenty-five centuries, but nothing to alter the relative disposition of mountain and plain in this part of Persia, or to change the general character of its ancient highway. All this part of Persia was under the dominion of the Assyrian king when the tribes of Israel left Syria for Armenia. He had but recently traversed the road to India, and he knew the richness of Baktria (of Afghan Turkistan and Badakshan) and could estimate what a colony might become in these eastern fields.

What more natural than that he should draft some of his captives eastward to the land of promise? There is not an important tribe of people in all that hinterland of India that has not been drafted in from somewhere. There is not a people left in India, for that matter, that can safely call themselves indigenous. From Persia and Media, from Aria and Skythia, from Greece and Arabia, from Syria and Mesopotamia they have come, and their coming can generally be traced historically, and their traditions of origin proved to be true. But there is one important people (of whom there is much more to be said) who call themselves Ben-i-Israel, who claim a descent from Kish, who have adopted a strange mixture of Mosaic law and Hindu ordinance in their moral code, who (some sections at least) keep a feast which strangely accords with the Passover, who hate the Yahudi (Jew) with a traditional hatred, and for whom no one has yet been able to suggest any other origin than the one they claim, and claim with determined force; and these people rule Afghanistan. It may be that they have justification for their traditions, even as others have; they may yet be proved to stand in the same relationship to the scattered remnants of Israel as some of the Kafir inhabitants of Northern Afghanistan can be shown to hold to the Greeks of pre-Alexandrian days. It is difficult to account for the name Afghan: it has been said that it is but the Armenian word Aghvan (Mountaineer). If this is so, it at once indicates a connection between the modern Afghan and the Syrian captives of Armenia.

But whilst "men in nations" were thus traversing the highlands of Persia from Mesopotamia to Northern Afghanistan by highways so ancient that they may be regarded almost as geographical fixtures as everlasting as the hills, we do not find much evidence of traffic with the Central Asian States north of the Oxus.

Early military excursions into the land of the Skyths were more for the purpose of dealing with the predatory habits of these warlike tribes, who afterwards peopled half of Europe as well as India, than of promoting either trade or geographical inquiry; and it was the route which led to Northern Afghanistan and Baktria through Northern Persia which was most attractive from its general accessibility and promise of profit. It was this way that Northern Kashmir and the gold-fields of Tibet were touched. The Indian gold which formed so large a part of the Persian revenues in the time of Darius undoubtedly came from Northern India and Tibet. Old as are the workings of the Wynaad gold-fields in the west, and Kolar in the east, of the peninsula, it is unlikely that either of these sources was known to Persia.

The more direct routes to India from Ecbatana, passing through Central Persia via Kashan, Yezd, and Kirman, terminated on the Helmund or in Makran, and there is no evidence that the mountain system which faces the Indus was ever crossed by invading Persian hosts. There was, indeed, a tradition in Alexander's time that an attempt had been made to traverse Makran and that it had failed. This, says Arrian, was one of the reasons why Alexander obstinately chose that route on his retirement from India. In spite, however, of the geographical difficulties which render it improbable that the hosts of Tiglath Pileser (who could have dealt with the Skythians of the north readily enough) ever broke across the north-western gateways of India's mountain borderland, there was undoubtedly a close connection between Assyria and India of which the evidence is still with us.

Throughout the golden age of the Second Empire of Assyria, after the subjugation of Babylon and the consolidation of the Empire by Tiglath Pileser, during the reigns of Sargon and Senacherib (who fought the first Assyrian naval fight), Esar Haddon (who destroyed Sidon and removed the inhabitants) and Assur-bani-pal (Sardanapalus), to the final overthrow of Assyria by Babylon in 625 B.C., when the star of Nebuchadnezzar arose on the southern horizon, Assyria held the supreme command of Eastern commerce, and Nineveh dictated the cannons of art to the world. No event more profoundly affected the commerce of Asia than the destruction of Sidon and the bodily transfer of its commercial inhabitants to Assyria. This was the age of Assyrian art, of literature, and of architecture; Assyrian culture realized its culminating point in the reign of Assur-bani-pal, when the library at Nineveh far surpassed any library that the world had ever seen. It was then that intercourse between Assyria and India became unbroken and intimate. Then public works of the largest dimensions were undertaken, and colonies formed for the purpose of developing the riches of the newly acquired lands in the East. Assyrian art found its way to India, and the affinity between Assyrian and Indian art is directly traceable still in spite of the impress subsequently effected by Greece and Rome.

The carpets that are spread on the floors of every Anglo-Indian home and which, as Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, or Indian, are to be found in every carpet shop in London, usually possess in the intricacies of their pattern some trace of ancient Assyrian art. As Sir George Birdwood has long ago pointed out, general similarities between Assyrian and Indian design in carpet patterns may possibly be due to a common Turanian origin, pre-Semitic and pre-Aryan; but there are details of architectural plan in the Southern Indian temples which, quite as much as the reproduction of the ancient Assyrian "knop and flower" in its infinite variety of form (all expressing more or less conventionally the cone and the lotus of the original idea), testify to an infinitely old art affinity, and at the same time witness to the wonderful vitality of intelligent design.

The tree of life so largely interwoven into Eastern fabrics was the "Asherah" or "grove" sacred to Asshur the supreme god of the Assyrians, the Lord and Giver of life; and it appears to have been the development of the "Hom" or lotus, which, although it is a Kashmir valley plant, is always admirably rendered in Assyrian sculpture. Eventually the date palm took the place of the Hom in the Euphrates valley, just as the vine replaced it in Asia Minor and Greece. In Central Asian rugs we find the cone replaced by the pomegranate, and the tree of life becomes a pomegranate tree. There is too much intricacy in such similarity of ornamental detail between Assyrian and Indian art for the result to have been merely developments from a common pre-historic stock along separate lines. They are clearly imitations one of the other, and the similarity is but another link in the chain of evidence which proves that the highways of Asia connecting Assyria with India through Persia were well-trodden ways seven centuries at least before Christ, even if the sea route from the Red Sea and Euphrates had not then reached the Indus and western coast of India.

Whilst all historical evidence points to the Tehran-Mashad route as the great highway which linked Mesopotamia with Baktria in past ages, there are certain curious little indications that the southern road through Persia, viz. Yezd and Kirman, was also well known, for it is a remarkable fact (which may be taken for what it is worth) that it is in the villages and bazaars of Sind that the potters may be found whose conservative souls delight in the reproduction of a class of ornamental decoration which most clearly indicates an Assyrian origin. The direct route to Sind from Mesopotamia is not by way of Herat. It is (as will be subsequently explained) via Kirman and Makran, but there is absolutely no historical evidence to support the suggestion that this was a route utilized by the Assyrians; and there is, on the other hand, Arrian's statement that roads through Makran were unknown or but legendary.

It is impossible, however, to ignore the fact that the sea route to North-western India was utilized in very ancient times; and although its connection with the northern landward gates of India may appear to be rather obscure, that connection is a matter which actually concerns us rather nearly in the present day. For it is by this ancient sea route that Persia and Baluchistan, Seistan and Afghanistan derive those supplies of small arms and ammunition which are abundant in those countries, but which never pass through India. Muskat is the chief depot for distribution, and the Persian ports of Bandar Abbas, Jask, or Pasni on the Makran coast are utilized as ports for the interior, leading by routes which are quite sufficiently good for caravan traffic towards the point where Afghan territory meets that of Persia and Baluchistan just south of Seistan. Once in Seistan they are well behind the passes which split our nearer line of defence in the trans-Indus hills. Even our command of the sea fails to suppress this traffic, which has led to such a general distribution of arms of precision (chiefly of German manufacture), that these countries may fairly claim to be able to arm their whole population. No recent researches in the Persian Gulf or on the Persian coast have added much to the sum of our knowledge respecting the early navigation of these Eastern seas, but there can be no question as to its immense antiquity. The Phœnician settler in Syria and Mesopotamia has been traced back to his primeval home in the Bahrein Islands, which, if Herodotus is correct in his estimated date for the founding of Tyre (2756 years B.C.), takes us back to very early times indeed for the coast navigation of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Seas. Hiram, King of Tyre, could look back through long ages to the days when his Phœnician forefathers started their well-packed vessels (the Phœnicians were famous for their skill in stowing cargo) to crawl along the coasts of Makran and Western India for the purpose of acquiring those stores of spices and gold which first made commerce profitable, or else to make their way westward, guided by the headlands and shore outlines of Southern Arabia, to gather the riches from African fields. Makran is full of strange relics of immense age for which none can account. Since Egyptology has become a recognized science, who will lay the foundations of such a science for Southern Arabia and Makran? When will some one arise with the wisdom and the leisure to write of the power of ancient Arabia, and to trace the impressions left on the whole world of commerce, of art, of architecture, and literature by the ancient races who hailed from the South?

We cannot tell when the first sea-borne trade passed to and fro between India and the Erythrean Sea, a creeping, slow-moving trade making the best shift possible of wind and tide, and knowing no guide but the pole star of that period, and the rocky headlands and islands of the Makran coast. Many of the ancient islands exist no more, but the coast is a peculiarly well-marked one for the mariner still. Probably the coast trade was earlier than the overland caravan traffic; but the latter was certainly co-existent with the Assyrian monarchy when Persia and Central Asia lay at the feet of the conqueror Tiglath Pileser.

CHAPTER III

GREEK EXPLORATION—ALEXANDER—MODERN BALKH—THE BALKH PLAIN AND BAKTRIA

Twenty-two centuries have rolled away since the first military expedition from Europe was organized and led into the wilds of an Asia which was probably as civilized then as it is now. Two thousand two hundred years, and yet along the wild stretches of the Indian frontier, where a mound here and there testifies to the former existence of some forgotten camp, or where in the slant rays of the evening sun faint indications may be traced on the level Punjab flats of the foundation of a city long since dead, the name of the great Macedonian is uttered with reverence and awe as might be the name of a god who can still influence the lives of men, yet qualified by an affix which indicates a curious survival of the mythological conception of gods as human beings. You may wander through some of the valleys cleft through the western frontier hills, where an intermittent rivulet of water spreads a network of streamlets on the boulder-covered bed of the nullah, and where the stony hills rise in barren slopes on either side, and find, perchance half hidden by weather-worn debris and tufts of stringy verdure, the remains of what was once an artificial water-channel, stone built and admirably graded, and you may ask who was responsible for this construction. Not a man can say. There is no history, no tradition even, connected with it. It passes their understanding. Doubtless it was the work of "Sekunder" (Alexander)—that prehistoric, mythological, incomprehensible, and yet beneficent being who lives in the minds of the frontier people as the apotheosis of the Deputy Commissioner. Yet the impression left on India by the Greeks is marvellously small. It is chiefly to be found in the architecture and the sculpture of the Punjab. The Greek language disappeared from the Indus valley about the end of the tenth century A.D., and there is hardly a Greek place-name now to be recognized anywhere on the Indus banks. But any unusual relic of the past, the story of which has passed beyond the memory of the present tribes-people (even though it may be obviously of mediæval Arabic origin), is invariably attributed to Alexander. It is, however, chiefly in the sculpture and decorations of Buddhist buildings (which never existed in Alexander's day) that clear evidence exists of Greek art conception. The classical features and folded raiment of the sculptured saints and buddhas, which are found so freely in certain parts of the Punjab, are obviously derived from original Greek ideals which may very possibly have been transmitted through Rome.

With Alexander in India we have nothing to do in these pages. It is as the first explorer in the regions beyond India, the Afghan and Baluchistan hinterlands, that he at present concerns us; and it may fairly be stated that no later expedition combining scientific research with military conquest ever added more to the sum of the world's knowledge of those regions than that led by Alexander. For centuries after it no light arises on the geographical horizon of the Indian border. Indeed, not until political exigencies caused by Russia's steady advance towards India compelled a revision of political boundaries in Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, and India, was any very accurate idea obtained of the geographical conditions of Northern and Western Afghanistan, or of Baluchistan, or of Southern Persia. The mapping of these countries has been recent, and the progress of it, as year by year the network of Indian triangulation and topography spread westward and northward, has reopened many sources of light which, if not altogether new, have lain hidden ever since the Macedonian conqueror passed over them. Long before the Greek army mustered on the banks of the Hellespont we have seen that the highways to the East were well trodden and well known. It was not likely that Alexander's intelligence department was lacking in information. For many centuries subsequent to that expedition the rise of the Parthian power absolutely cut off these old-world trade communications and set the restless tides of human emigration into new channels. But in Alexander's time there was nothing in Persia to interrupt the interchange of courtesies between East and West.

The great Aryan tide had already flowed from the Central Asian highlands into India, but Jutes and Skyths had yet to make that great drift westward which peopled half of Europe with nomadic tribes speaking kindred tongues—a drift which never rested in its westward advance till, as Anglians and Saxons, it had enveloped England and faced its final destiny in an American continent. Assyria had passed by with arts and commerce rather than with arms, and Persia had followed in Assyrian tracks. Both had established colonies half-way to India in the Afghan highlands, Persia with the aid of captive Greeks, and Assyria with people taken from the Syrian land. The list of Assyrian and Persian satrapies included all those lands which we now call the hinterland of India, and which in Alexander's time must have been absolutely Persianized. But beyond the historical evidence which can be collected to prove the early, the constant, traffic which ensued between Mesopotamia, or Asia Minor, and India, after the consolidation of those two great empires, there is the tradition which certain Greek writers (notably Arrian) treat rather scornfully, of the conquest of Upper India by the mythical hero Bacchus. It is never wise to treat any tradition scornfully, and Arrian is himself obliged to admit the difficulty of explaining certain records connected with Alexander's history, without assuming that the tradition was not groundless.

Writing of the city of Nysa, Arrian says that "it was built by Dionysos or Bacchus, when he conquered the Indians; but who this Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the Indians is hard to determine, whether he was that Theban who from Thebes, or he who from Timolus, a mountain of Lydia, undertook that famous expedition into India is very uncertain." There is a Greek epic poem in hexameter verse, called the "Dionysiaka," or "Bassarika," which tells of the conquest of India by Bacchus, the greatest of all his achievements. The author is Nonnus of Panopolis in Egypt, who wrote about the beginning of the fifth century of our era. Bacchus is said to have received a command from Zeus to turn back the Indians, who had extended their conquests to the Mediterranean, and in the execution of this command he marched through Syria and Assyria. In Assyria he was entertained with magnificent hospitality. Nothing further is said of the route he took to reach India. The first battle which took place in India was on the banks of the Hydaspes, where the Indians were routed. Then followed as an incident in the war the destruction of the Indian fleet in a naval battle, which is instructive. It took the assistance of the goddess of war, Pallas Athene, to bring the campaign to a conclusion, which terminated with the death of the Indian leader Deriades. Here, then, is crystallized in verse the tradition to which Arrian refers, and remembering that we are indebted to two great epics of India, the "Ramayana" and the "Mahabharata," for such glimmering of the ancient history of the Aryan occupation of India as we possess, we may very well conceive that the germs of real historical fact lie half-concealed in this poem of Nonnus. However that may be, it is tolerably certain that Alexander found a people in Northern India who claimed a Greek origin when he arrived there, quite apart from the colonists of Baktria who had been transported there by Darius Hydaspes, and that he recognized their claim to distant relationship.

When Alexander, then, mustered his army in the sunny fields of Macedon he was preparing for an expedition over no uncertain ways between Greece and Baktria or Arachosia (Northern and Western Afghanistan). He knew what lay before him if he could once break through the Persian barrier; and the strength of that barrier he must have been well aware lay as much in the stern fighting qualities of the mercenary Greek legions in the pay of Persia as in the hosts of Persian and Indian troops which the Persian monarch could array against him. We have lists of the component forces on both sides. The Macedonian legions were homogeneous and patriotic. The Persian army was partly European, but chiefly Asiatic, with a mixed company of Asiatic troops such as has probably never taken the field since. The opposing forces, indeed, partook of the nature of the two armies which fought out the issue of the Russo-Japanese campaign, and the result was much the same. There was no tie of national sentiment to bind together the unwieldy cohorts of Persia. They fought for their pay, and they fought well; but when big battalions are divided in religious sentiment and unswayed by patriotism, they are no match for Macedonian cohesion, Mahomedan Jehad, or Japanese Bushido.

It is quite interesting to examine the details of Alexander's army. The main body consisted of six brigades of 3000 men, each united to form an irresistible phalanx. Heavily armoured, with a long shield, a long sword, and a four-and-twenty foot spear (sarina), the infantryman of the phalanx must have possessed a powerful physique to enable him to carry himself and his weapons in the field. The depth of the phalanx was sixteen ranks, and the first six ranks were so placed that they could all bring their spears into action at once. The bulk of the phalanx consisted of Macedonians only. The light infantry, bowmen, and dartsmen numbered about 6000. A third corps of 6000 men more lightly armed, but with longer swords than the phalangists (called Hypaspists), were intermediate. The cavalry consisted of three classes, light, heavy, and medium, 3000 Macedonian and Thessalian horsemen, heavily armoured, forming its main strength. The light cavalry were Thracian lancers. The Royal Horse Guard included eight Macedonian squadrons of horsemen picked from the best families in Greece. It is useful to note that there were mounted infantry and artillery (i.e. balistai and katapeltai) with the force. More useful still to note that none of Alexander's victories were won by the solid strength of his phalanx; it was the sweeping and resistless force of his cavalry charges (often led by himself) that gained them.

Perhaps the most notable feature about this Greek expedition to India was the fact that it was the first military expedition of which there is any record which included scientific inquiry as one of its objects. Alexander had on his personal staff men of literary if not of scientific acquirements, and it is to them doubtless that we owe a comparatively clear account of the expedition, although unfortunately their records have only been transmitted to us by later authors. If we could but recover originals what a host of doubtful points might be cleared up! It is true that previous to the date of Alexander one man of genius, Xenophon, had kept a record of a magnificent military achievement, and had proved himself to be master of literature as he was of the science of leading; but Xenophon stands alone, and it may be doubted whether, during the many centuries which have passed away since the era of Greek supremacy, any practical leader of men has ever attained such a splendid position in the ranks of writers of military history. Alexander appears, at any rate, to have been no historian, but his staff of cultivated literary assistants and men of letters included many notable Greek names.

Alexander crossed the Hellespont in the spring of the year 334 B.C., and first encountered the Persians near the Granikos River. The battle was decisive although the losses on either side do not appear to have been heavy. It was but the augury of what was to follow. The subsequent advance of the Macedonian troops southward through the lovely land of Iona, and the reduction of Miletus and Helikarnassos, brought the first year's campaign to a close. The second year opened with the conquest of Pamphyllia and Phrygia, the passage of the Tauros ranges being made in winter. On the return of spring he recrossed the Tauros and reduced the western hill-tribes of Kilikia. Part of his force, meanwhile, had occupied the passes into Syria known as the Syrian gates. Within two days march of the Syrian gates the Persian hosts again were massed in an open plain under Darius, who had advanced from the east, waiting to fall upon the Macedonian troops and crush them as they debouched from the defile. Tired of waiting, however, Darius moved forward into Kilikia by the Amanian passes to look for Alexander, and thus it happened that when Alexander finally emerged from the Syrian gates into the plains of Syria he found his enemy behind him. He partially retraced his steps and regained the pass by midnight, and there from one of the adjoining summits he "beheld the Persian watch-fires gleaming far and wide over the plain of Issos." The rapidity of Alexander's movements was only equalled by the fierce energy of his onslaught when he led his cavalry against the unwieldy formations of his Persian enemy. It was his own hand that gained the victory both then and afterwards.

There is no more stirring story in all history than this progress of the Macedonian force. Step by step it has been traced out from Granikos to Issos and from Issos to Arbela; but this is not the place to recapitulate that part of the story which applies only to Western Asia. It is not until after the final decisive battle at Arbela, when Darius fled in hot haste along the south-eastern road to Ecbatana, the former capital of Media, and thence in the spring of 330 B.C. retreated with a disorganized force and an intriguing court towards Baktria, where he hoped to find a refuge with his kinsman Bessos the satrap of that province, that we really touch on the subject with which we wish to deal in this book, viz. the high-roads to Afghanistan in those long past days. Alexander, meanwhile, had received the submission of Babylon and restored the temple of Belus, and made himself master of a more spacious empire than the world had yet seen. It was then that the amazing results of his military success began to turn his head. From this point the severe simplicity of the Macedonian soldier is exchanged for the luxury, arrogance, and intolerance of the despot and conqueror. As Alexander advanced in material strength so did he slide down the easy descent of moral retrogression, and whilst we can still admire his magnificence as a military leader we find little else left to admire about him. From Babylon to the lovely valley wherein lies Susa, and from Susa to Persepolis, was more or less of a triumphal march in spite of the fierce opposition of the satrap Artobaizanes. Of Persepolis we are taught to believe that Alexander left nothing behind him but blackened ruins—the result of a drunken orgy. During the winter, amidst snow and ice, he subdued the Mardians in their mountain fastnesses (for he never left an active foe on the flank or rear), and with the return of the sweet Persian spring he renewed his hunt after Darius, turning his face to the north and east.

There are two high-roads through Persia to the East—one leading to Northern Afghanistan and the Oxus regions over Mashad, the other to Kirman, Seistan, and Kandahar. Along both of them there now runs a telegraph line connecting with the Russian system via Mashad, and the Indian system via Kirman. They must always have been high-roads—the great trade routes to Central Asia and India. Where the orderly line of telegraph poles now stretches in unending regularity to mark the dusty highway, there, through more ages than we can count, the padded foot of the camel must have worn the road into ridges and ruts as he plodded his weary way with loads of merchandise and fodder. No geological evolution can have disturbed those tracks since the Assyrian kings first drew riches from the East and started colonies on the Baktrian highlands; they are now as they were 1000 years before Christ, and it is only natural that in the ordinary course of the same unresting spirit of enterprise the telegraph posts will sooner or later cast long shadows over a passing railway. The desert regions of Persia separate these two roads: the wide flat spaces of sand or "Kavir"; an unending procession of sand-hills on the glittering fields of salt-bound swamp. The desert is crossable—it has been fairly well exploited—but nothing so far has been found in it to justify the expectation of great discoveries of dead and buried cities, or traces of a former civilization such as once occupied the deserts of Chinese Turkistan.

We may well believe that the central deserts of Persia were the same in Alexander's time as they are in ours. Consequently any large company of people would have been more or less forced into one or other of the well-known routes which the geographical configuration of the country presented to them. In his pursuit of Darius Alexander followed the northern route to Baktria which strikes a little north of east from Ecbatana (Hamadan), and in these days leads direct to Tehran the modern capital of Persia. The tragical fate of Darius, and Alexander's crocodile grief thereat, belongs to another story. It is only when he touches the regions beyond Mashad that he figures as one of the earliest explorers of Afghanistan, and certainly the earliest of whom we have any certain record. Unfortunately these records say very little of the nature of those cities and centres of human life which he found on the Afghan border; nor is there any definite allusion to be found in the writings of Alexander's historians to the colonial occupation of Afghanistan which must have preceded the Persian conquests. We have seen that Assyrian influence was strongly and continuously felt in India for many centuries after the consolidation of the Second Assyrian Empire, and the probability that between the Tigris and the Oxus there must have been intercommunication from the earliest days of the rise of Assyrian power.

There is one ragged and time-worn city in Afghan Turkistan which certainly belongs to the centuries preceding the era of Alexander—it was the capital of Baktria, the city of Bessos, and it has been a great centre of commerce, a city of pilgrimage, Buddhist and Mahomedan, for many a century since. This is Balkh, traditionally known as the "Mother of cities," whose foundation is variously ascribed to Nimrud, or to "Karomurs the Persian Romulus," Assyrian or Persian as the fancy strikes the narrator. Of its extreme antiquity there can be no doubt. It is certain that at a very early date it was the rival of Ecbatana, of Nineveh, and of Babylon. Bricks with inscriptions are said to have been found there some seventy years ago, and similar bricks should certainly be there still. Officers of the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission passed through modern Balkh in 1884, but no such bricks were found during the very cursory and entirely superficial examination which was all that could be made of the place; square bricks, without inscription, of the size and quality of those which may any day be dug out of the Birs Nimrud at Babylon were certainly found, and point to a similarity of construction in a part of the ancient walls, which is surely not accidental. Modern Balkh consists of about 500 houses of Afghan settlers, a colony of Jews, and a small bazaar set in the midst of a waste of ruins and many acres of debris. The walls of the city are 6½ or 7 miles in perimeter; in some places they are supported by a rampart like the walls of Herat. These, of course, are modern, as is the fort and citadel, or Bala Hissar, which stands on a mound to the north-east. The green cupola of the Masjid Sabz and the arched entrance to the ruined Madrasa testify to modern Mahomedan occupation, as do the Top-i-Rustam and the Takht-i-Rustam (two ancient topes) to the fervour of religious zeal with which its Buddhist inhabitants invested it in the early centuries of our era. Balkh awaits its Layard, and not only Balkh, for there are mounds and ruins innumerable scattered through the breadth of the Balkh plain.

As one approaches Balkh by the Akcha road from the west, one looks anxiously around for some outward signs of its extreme antiquity. They are not altogether wanting, but time and the mellowing hand of Nature have rounded off the edges of the mounds of debris which lie scattered over miles of the surrounding country, brushing them over with the fresh green of vegetation, and leaving no sign by which to judge of the age of them. It is difficult in this part of Asia to get back farther than the age of the great destroyer Chenghiz Khan. His time has passed by long enough to leave but little evidence that the hand of the destroyer was his hand; but probably nothing visible on the surface dates back further than the six centuries which have come and gone since his Mongol hordes were set loose. Beyond these surface ruins and below them there must be cities arranged, as it were, in underground flats, one piled on another, strata below strata, till we reach the debris of the pre-Semitic days of Western and Central Asia, when the Turanian races who supplied Arcadian civilization to Mesopotamia peopled the land. Just as we cannot tell exactly when Babylon first became a city, so are we confounded by the age of Balkh. Babylon belongs to the time when myths were grouped around the adventures of a solar hero. Ultimately, however, the Ca-dimissa of the Accad became the Bab-ili (the "gate of God") of the Semite. It was always the "gate of God," but whether the presiding deity was always the Accadian Merodach seems doubtful. Fourteen or fifteen centuries before Christ there was probably a Balkh as there was a Babylon; and from time immemorial and a date unreckoned Balkh and Babylon must have been the two great commercial centres of Asia. What a history to dig out when its time shall come!

As the Akcha road leads into the city it passes the outer wall, which is about 30 feet high, by a gateway which is frankly nothing more than a gap in the partially destroyed wall. It then skirts along, past a ziarat gay with red flags, to a gateway in the second wall under the citadel leading to an avenue of poplars ending with a garden. Here is a pretentious and fairly comfortable caravanserai, facing a court which is shaded by magnificent plane trees. At first sight Balkh appears to consist of nothing but ruins, but ascending the mound, which is surrounded by the dilapidated fort walls, one can see from this vantage of about 70 feet how many new buildings are grouped round the remnants of the old Mahomedan mosque, of which the dome and one great gateway are all that is left.

The plain of the ancient Baktria, of which Balkh represents the capital, lies south of the Oxus River, extending east and west for some 200 miles parallel to the river after its debouchment from the mountains of Badakshan. It is flat, with a scattering of prominences and mounds at intervals denoting the site of some village or fortress of sufficient antiquity to account for its gradual rise on the accumulations of its own debris, probably assisted in the first instance by some topographical feature. Looking south it appears to be flanked by a flat blue wall of hills, presenting no opportunity for escalade or passage through them, a blue level line of counterscarp, which is locally known as the Elburz. This great flanking wall is in reality very nearly what it appears to be—an unassailable rampart; but there are narrow ways intersecting it not easily discernible, and through these ways the rivers of the highlands make a rough passage to the plains. Wherever they tumble through the mountain gateways and make placid tracks in the flats below, they are utilized for irrigation purposes, and so there exists a narrow fringe of cultivation under the hills, which extends here and there along the banks of the rivers out into the open Balkh plain. But these rivers never reach the Oxus. This is not merely because the waters of them are absorbed in irrigation, but because there is a well-ascertained tectonic action at work which is slowly raising the level of the plain. Thus it happens that whilst big affluents from the north bring rushing streams of much silt-stained water to the great river, no such affluents exist on the south. The waters of the Elburz streams are all lost in the Oxus plain ere they reach the river. Nevertheless there are abundant evidences of the former existence of a vast irrigation system drawn from the Oxus. The same lines of level mounds which break the horizon of the plains of Babylon are to be seen here, and they denote the same thing. They are the containing walls of canals which carried the Oxus waters through hundreds of square miles of flat plain, where they never can be carried again because of the alteration in the respective levels of plain and river. Ten centuries before Christ, at least, were the plains of Babylon thus irrigated, and just as the arts of Greece and India rose on the ashes of the arts of Nineveh, so doubtless was the science of irrigation carried into the colonial field of Baktria from Assyria, and thus was the city of "Nimrud" surrounded with a wealth of cultivation which rendered it famous through Asia for more centuries than we can tell. Whether or no the science of irrigation drifted eastwards from the west it seems more than probable that the ruined and decayed water-ways which intersect the Balkh plain were primarily due to the introduction of Syrian labour, and account for the presence in that historic region of a people amongst others who claim descent from captive Israelites. There are no practical irrigation engineers in the world (excepting perhaps the Chinese) who can rival the Afghans in their knowledge of how to make water flow where water never flowed before. It is of course impossible, on such evidence as we possess as yet, to claim more than the appearance of a probability based on such an undeniable possibility as this.

After the death of Darius his kinsman Bessos escaped into his own satrapy (probably to Balkh), and there assumed the upright tiara, the emblem of Persian royalty, taking at the same time the name of Artaxerxes.

True to his invariable principle of leaving no unbeaten enemy on the flank of his advance, Alexander proceeded to subjugate Hyrkania, from which country he was separated by the Elburz (Persian) mountains. He crossed those mountains in three divisions by separate passes, and effected his purpose with his usual thoroughness and without much difficulty. Having crushed the Mardians he shaped a straight course eastward to Herat on his way to Baktria, marching by the great highway which connects Tehran with Mashad. The country around Mashad (part of Khorasan) was a satrapy of Persia under Satibarzanes, who submitted without apparent opposition and was confirmed in his government. The capital of this province was Artakoana, described as a city situated in a plain of exceptional fertility where the main roads from north to south and from west to east crossed each other. To no place does such a description apply so closely as Herat, and it has consequently been assumed that Herat indicates more or less closely the site of the ancient city Artakoana, which, indeed, is most probable. But Alexander had not long passed that city in his march towards Baktria when the news of the revolt of Satibarzanes reached him with the story of the loss of the Macedonian escort which had been left with that satrap and had been massacred to a man. He immediately turned on his tracks, captured Artakoana, routed the satrap, and by way of leaving a permanent monument of his victory founded a new city in the neighbourhood which he called Alexandreia. This is probably the actual origin of the modern Herat, and it is a tribute to the sagacity of the Macedonian King that from that time to this it has abundantly proved its importance as a strategical and commercial centre.

The forward march to Baktria would have taken the Greek army via Kushk, Maruchak, and Maimana along the route which is practically the easiest and safest for a large body of troops. It is the route followed by the Afghan Boundary Commission in 1885. Alexander, however, instead of resuming his march on Baktria, elected to crush another of the Persian satraps who was concerned in the murder of Darius and who ruled a province to the south of Herat. Crossing the Hari Rud he therefore marched straight on Farah (Prophthasia), then the capital of Seistan (Drangiana). Farah is considerably to the north of any part of the Afghan province of Seistan at present, but it was undoubtedly Alexander's objective, and the Drangiana of those times was considerably more extensive than the Seistan of to-day—a fact which will go some way to account for the exaggerated reports of the ancient wealth and fertility of that province. Farah is a great agricultural centre still, and would add enormously to the restricted cultivable area of Seistan, even if one allows for the effects of sand encroachment in that unpleasant region. Then occurred the plot against Alexander's life which was detected at Prophthasia, and the consequent torture and death of Philotas, who probably had no part in it. It is one of the many actions of Alexander's life which reveals the ferocity of the barbarian beneath the genius of the soldier. It was but the barbarity of his age—a barbarity for the matter of that which lasted in England till the time of the Georges, and which still survives in Afghanistan. After a halt in Seistan, probably whilst waiting for reinforcements, he struck north-eastwards again for Baktria. As it is generally assumed that the Macedonian force now followed the Helmund valley route to the Paropamisos, i.e. the Hindu Kush and its extension westwards, it is as well to consider what sort of a country it is that forms the basin of Helmund.

It is worth remarking in the first place that the Ariaspian inhabitants of the Helmund valley had received from Cyrus the name of Euergetai, or benefactors, because they had assisted him at a time when he had been in great difficulties. This is enough to satisfy us that the district was known and had been traversed by a military force long before Alexander entered it, and that he was making no venturesome advance in ignorance of what lay before him. The valley of the Helmund (or Etymander) could not have differed greatly in its geographical features 300 years before Christ from its present characteristics. The Helmund of the Seistan basin then occupied a different channel to its present outlets into the Seistan swamps. How different it is difficult to tell, for it has frequently changed its course within historic times, silting up its bed and striking out a new channel for itself, splitting into a number of streams and wandering uncontrolled in loops or curves over the face of the flat alluvial plains to which it brought fertility and wealth. It has been a perpetual source of political discussion as a boundary between Afghanistan and Persia, and it has altered the face of the land so extensively and so often that there is nothing in ancient history referring to the vast extent of agricultural wealth and the immensity of its population which can be proved to be impossible, although it seems likely enough that false inferences have been drawn from the widespread area of ruined and deserted towns and villages which are still to be seen and may almost be counted. It is not only that the water-supply and facilities for irrigation, by shifting their geographical position, have carried with them the potentialities for cultivation. Other forces of Nature which seem to be set loose on Seistan with peculiar virulence and activity have also been at work. The sweeping blasts of the north-west wind, which rage through this part of Asia with a strength and persistence unknown in regions more protected by topographical features, carrying with them vast volumes of sand and surface detritus, piling up smooth slopes to the windward side of every obstruction, smoothing off the rough angles of the gaunt bones of departed buildings, and sometimes positively wearing them away by the force of attrition, play an important part in the kaleidoscopic changes of Seistan landscape. Villages that are flourishing one year may be sand-buried the next. Channels that now run free with crop-raising water may be choked in a month, and all the while the great Helmund, curving northward in its course, pours down its steady volume of silt from the highlands, carrying tons of detritus into open plains where it is spread out, sun-baked, dried, wind-blown, and swirled back again to the southward in everlasting movement. Thus it is that the evidence of hundreds of square miles of ruins is no direct evidence of an immense population at any one period. Nor can we say of this great alluvial basin, which is by turns a smiling oasis, a pestilential swamp, a huge spread of populous villages, or a howling desert smitten with a wind which becomes a curse and afflicted with many of the pests and plagues of ancient Egypt, that at any one period of its history more than another it deserved the appellation of the "granary of Asia." The Helmund of Seistan, however, is quite a different Helmund from the same river nearer its source. Its character changes from the point where it makes its great bend northward towards its final exit into the lagoons and swamps of the Hamún. At Chaharburjak, where the high-road to Seistan from the south crosses the river into Afghan territory, the Helmund is a wide rippling stream (when not in flood), distinguished, if anything, for the clearness of its waters. From this point eastwards it parts two deserts. To the north the great, flat, windswept Dasht-i-Margo, about as desolate and arid a region as fancy could depict. To the south the desert of Baluchistan, by no means so absolutely devoid of interest, with its marshalled sand-dunes answering to the processes of the winds, its isolated but picturesque peaks like islands in a sand sea, a few green spots here and there showing where water oozes out from the buried feet of the rocky hills, decorated with bunches of flowering tamarisk and perchance a palm or two—a modified desert, but still a desert. Between the two deserts is the Helmund, running in a cliff-sided trough which is never more than a mile or two wide, intensely green and bright in the grass and crop season, with flourishing villages at reasonable intervals and a high-road connecting them from which can be counted that strange multitude of departed cities of the old Kaiani Kingdom, which are marked by a ragged crop of ruins still upstanding in a weird sort of procession. Sometimes the high-road sweeps right into the midst of a roofless palace, through the very walls of the ancient building, and outside may be found spaces brushed clean by the wind leaving masses of pottery, glass, and other common debris exposed.

One constant surprise to modern explorers is the extraordinary quantity of domestic crockery the remains of which surround old eastern cities; and almost yet more of a surprise it is how far and how widespread are certain easily recognized specialities, such, for instance, as the so-called "celadon." Chips and fragments of celadon are to be found from Babylon to Seistan, from Seistan to India, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Siam. In Siam are all that remains of what were probably the original furnaces. Every shower of rain that falls in this extended cemetery of crumbling monuments reveals small treasures in the way of rings, coins, seals, etc. Much of the cultivation and of the extent of population indicated by the ruins in this narrow valley must have existed in the times of Alexander of Macedon and the Ariaspians, and we find no difficulty in accepting the Helmund (or Etymander) as the line of route which he followed for a certain distance. Indeed, there is much more than a passing probability that he followed the line which gave him water and supplies as far as the junction of the Argandab and Helmund, for the problem of crossing the desert from the Helmund valley to Nushki and the cultivated districts of Kalat is a serious one—one, indeed, which gave the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commissioners much anxious thought. But beyond the Argandab junction it is extremely improbable that Alexander followed the Helmund. The Helmund and its surroundings have been carefully surveyed from this point through the turbulent districts of Zamindawar for 100 miles or more, and again from its source near Kabul for some fifty miles of its downward flow. The Zamindawar section of the river affords an open road, although the river, as we follow it upward, gradually becomes enclosed in comparatively narrow (yet still fertile) valleys, and rapidly assumes the character of a mountain stream. North of Zamindawar and south of its exit from the Koh-i-Baba mountain system to the west of Kabul, no modern explorer has ever seen the Helmund. It there passes through the Hazara highlands, and although we have not penetrated that rugged plateau we know very well its character by repute, and we have seen similar country to the west where dwell cognate tribes—the Taimani and the Firozkohi. This upland basin of the Helmund to the west of Kabul and Ghazni, this cradle of a hundred affluents pouring down ice-cold water to the river, is but a huge extension southwards of the Hindu Kush, and from it emerge many of the great rivers of Afghanistan. To the north the rivers of Balkh and Khulm take a hurried start for the Oxus plains. Westward the Hari Rud streams off to Herat. South-westward extends the long curving line of the Helmund, and eastward flow the young branches of the Kabul. A rugged mountain mass called the Koh-i-Baba, the lineal continuation of the Hindu Kush, dominates the rolling plateau from the north and continues westward in an almost unbroken wall to the Band-i-Baian looking down into the narrow Hari Rud valley. It is a part of the continental divide of Asia, high, rugged, desolate, and almost pathless.

No matter from which side the toiler of the mountains approaches this elevated and desolate region, whether emerging from the Herat drainage he essays to reach Kabul, or from the small affluents of the Helmund he strikes for the one gap which exists between the Hindu Kush and the Koh-i-Baba which will lead him to Balkh and Afghan Turkistan, he will have enormous difficulties to encounter. It can be done, truly, but only with the pains and penalties of high mountaineering attached. Taken as a whole, the highest uplands above the sources of the minor rivers which water the bright and fertile valleys of Ghur, Zamindawar, and Farah may be described much as one would describe Tibet—a rolling, heaving, desolate tableland, wrinkled and intersected by narrow mountain ranges, whose peaks run to 13,000 and 14,000 feet in altitude, enclosing between them restricted spaces of pasture land. The Mongol population, who claim to have been introduced as military settlers by Chenghiz Khan, live a life of hard privation. They leave their barren wastes which the wind wipes clear of any tree growth, for the lower valleys in the winter months, merely resorting to them in the time of summer pasturage. The winter is long and severe. It is not the altitude alone which is accountable for its severity; it is the geographical position of this Central Afghan upheaval which exposes it to the full blast of the ice-borne northern winds which, sweeping across Turkistan with destructive energy, reduce the atmosphere of Seistan to a sand-laden fog, and penetrate even to the valley of the Indus where for days together they wrap the whole landscape in a dusty haze. For many months the Hazara highlands are buried under successive sheets of snowdrift. In summer, like the Pamirs, they emerge from their winter's sleep and become a succession of grass-covered downs. There are then open ways across them, and travellers may pass by many recognizable tracks. But in winter they are impassable to man and beast. Yet we are asked to believe that Alexander, who had the best of guides in his pay, and who knew the highways and byways of Asia as well, if not better, than they are known now to any military authorities, took his army in winter up the Helmund valley till it struck its sources somewhere under the Koh-i-Baba!

There was no madness in Alexander's methods. His withdrawal from India through the defiles and deserts of Makran was most venturesome and most disastrous, but he had a distinct object to gain by the attempt to pass into Persia that way. Here there was no object. The Helmund route does not, and did not, lead directly to his objective, Baktria, and there was another high-road always open, which must have been as well known then as, indeed, it is well known to-day. There can be very little doubt that he followed the Argandab to the neighbourhood of the modern Kandahar (in Arachosia), and from Kandahar to Kabul he took the same historic straight high-road which was followed by a later General (Lord Roberts) when he marched from Kabul to Kandahar. This would give him quite difficulties enough in winter to account for Arrian's story of cold and privations. It would lead him direct to the plains of the Kohistan north of Kabul, where there must have ever been the opportunity of collecting supplies for his force, and where, separated from him by the ridges of the Hindu Kush, were planted those Greek colonies of Darius Hystaspes whose assistance might prove invaluable to his onward movement. It was here, at any rate, not far from the picturesque village of Charikar, that he founded that city of Alexandreia, the remains of which appear to have been recently disturbed by the Amir, and to which we shall make further reference. Military text-books still speak of the Unai, or Bamian, as a pass which was traversed by the Greeks. It is most improbable that they ever crossed the Hindu Kush that way, and the question obviously arises in connection with this theory of his march—How was it possible for Alexander to spend the rest of the winter near the sources of the Helmund? It was not possible. His next step was to cross the Hindu Kush. This he attempted with difficulty in the spring, and reached a fertile country in fifteen days. He might have crossed by the Kaoshan Pass (which local tradition assigns as the pass which he really selected), or by the Panjshir, which is longer, but in some respects easier. The Panjshir is the pass usually adopted for the passage of large bodies of troops by the Afghans themselves, and there is reported to be, in these days, a well-engineered Khafila road, which is kept open by forced labour in snow-time, connecting Kabul with Andarab by this route. The pass of the Panjshir is about 11,600 feet high, whereas the Kaoshan, though straighter, is 14,300. Considering the slow rate of movement (fifteen days) it is more probable that he took the easier route via Panjshir. In either case he would reach the beautiful and fertile valley of Andarab, and from that base he could move freely into Baktria. The country had been ravaged and wasted by Bessos, but that did not delay Alexander. The chief cities of Baktria surrendered without opposition, and he pushed forward to the Oxus in his pursuit of Bessos.

All this would be more interesting if we could trace the route more closely which was followed to the Oxus. We know, however, that for previous centuries Balkh had been the capital city, the great trade emporium of all that region. There is therefore no difficulty in accepting Balkh as the Greek Baktria. Between Balkh and the Oxus the plains are strewn with ruins, some of them of vast extent, whilst other evidences of former townships are to be found about Khulm and Tashkurghan farther to the east, and on the direct route from Andarab to the Oxus. Bessos had retreated to Sogdiana of which Marakanda was capital, and the straight road to Marakanda (Samarkand) crosses the Oxus at Kilif. The description of the river Oxus at that point tallies fairly well with Arrian's account of it. It is deep and rapid, and the hill fortress of Kilif on the right bank, and of Dev Kala and other isolated rocky hills on the left, hedges in the river to a channel which cannot have changed through long ages. Elsewhere the Oxus is peculiarly liable to shift its channel, and has done so from time to time, forming new islands, taking fresh curves, and actually changing its destination from the Caspian to the Aral Sea; but at Kilif it must have ever been deep and rapid, covering a breadth of about three-quarters of a mile. Across the breadth nowadays is about as peculiar a ferry as was ever devised. Long, shallow, flat-bottomed boats, square as to bow and stern, are towed from side to side of the river by swimming horses. This would not be a matter of so much surprise if the horses employed for the purpose were powerful animals from fourteen to fifteen hands in height, but the remarkable feature about the Kilif stud is the diminutive and ragged crew of underfed ponies which it produces. And yet two, or even one, of these inefficient-looking little animals will tow across a barge of twenty feet or so in length, crowded with weighty bales of Bokhara merchandise, and filled as to interstices with its owners and their servants. The ponies are attached to outriggers with a strap from a surcingle or belly-band buckled to their backs, thus supporting their weight in the water at the same time that it takes the haulage. With their heads just above stream, snorting and blowing, they swim with measured strokes and tow the boat (advancing diagonally in crab-like fashion to meet the current) straight across the river. The inadequacy of the means to the end is the first thing which strikes the beholder, but he is, however, rapidly convinced of the extraordinary hauling capacity of a swimming horse when properly trained. Alexander crossed on rafts supported on skins stuffed with straw, and it took him five days to cross his force in this primitive fashion.

On the right bank of the river, Bessos was given up by traitors in his camp and was sent south to "Zariaspa" to await his doom. Zariaspa is identified with Balkh by some authorities, but the name is probably a variant on Adraspa which almost certainly was Andarab. Andarab was the fertile and promising district into which Alexander descended from the slopes of the Hindu Kush, by whichever route (Kaoshan or Panjshir) he crossed those mountains. Directly on the route between Andarab and Balkh is a minor province called Baglan, and a little less than half-way (after crossing a local pass of no great significance called Kotal Murgh) is a village or township, nowadays called Zardaspan, which is sufficiently like Zariaspa to suggest an identity which is at least plausible though it may be deceptive. But it is the fact that the town of Baraki which lies farther on the same route is on the outskirts of Baglan; and in this connection a reference to the theory put forward by Dr. Bellew in his Ethnography of Afghanistan (Asiatic Quarterly, October 1891) is at least interesting. He points out that the captive Greeks who were transported in the sixth century B.C. by Darius Hystaspes from the Lybian Barké to Baktrian territory were still occupying a village called Barké in the time of Herodotus. A century later again during the Macedonian campaign, Kyrenes, or Kyreneans, existed in that region according to Arrian, and it is difficult to account for them in that part of Asia unless they were the descendants of those same exiles from Barké, a colony of Kyrene whom Darius originally transported to Baktria. They were in possession of the Kaoshan Pass too, and might have rendered very effective aid to Alexander during his passage across the mountains. Another body of Greek colonists are recorded to have been settled in this same part of Baktria by Xerxes after his flight from Greece, namely, the Brankhidai, whose original settlement appears to have been in Andarab. As we shall see later, people from Greece or from Grecian colonies undoubtedly drifted across Asia to Northern Afghanistan in even earlier times than those of the Persian Empire. There can, indeed, be very little doubt that Ariaspa, or Andarab, was an important position for the Greeks to occupy from its strategic value as commanding the most practicable of the Hindu Kush passes.

When Bessos, therefore, was deported across the Oxus to Zariaspa it is probable that he was sent to Andarab; and here too Alexander returned to winter towards the close of the year 329 B.C. after his extraordinary success in Sogdia (Bokhara). With his trans-Oxus campaign we have nothing to do; it is another history, and deeply interesting as it would be to follow it in detail we must return to Afghanistan. Nothing in all his Eastern campaign is more remarkable than the facility with which Alexander recruited his army from Greece during its progress. Gaps in the ranks were constantly filled up, and the fighting strength of his force maintained at a high level. His army was reorganized during the winter, and with the returning spring he again started expeditions across the Oxus, in the course of which he captured Roxana, the most beautiful woman in Asia (after the wife of Darius) and married her. The particular fortress which held this charming lady was perched on the top of an isolated craggy hill, and the story of its capture is as thrilling as that of Aornos subsequently. But, like Aornos, it is difficult to locate it. It might have been Dev Kala, or Kilif, or any of a dozen such rock-crowned hills which border the Oxus River. It is about this period that we read first of his encounters with the Skythic races of Central Asia, who gave him great trouble at the time and who subsequently subverted the Greek power in Baktria altogether. In the spring of 327 B.C. he moved out to invade a mountain district to the "East of Baktria" (probably modern Badakshan), and subdued the hill-tribes under Khorienes whom he confirmed in the government of his own country. It was summer ere he set out finally from Baktria on his Indian expedition. He recrossed the Paropamisos in ten days and halted at Alexandreia near Charikar. Then commences the first recorded expedition of the Kabul River basin.

CHAPTER IV

GREEK EXPLORATION—ALEXANDER—THE KABUL VALLEY TO THE INDUS

Alexander passed the next winter at the city of his own founding, Alexandreia, in the Koh Daman to the north of Kabul. And from thence in two divisions he started for the Indus, sending the main body of his troops by the most direct route, with Taxila (the capital of the Upper Punjab) for its objective, and himself with lighter brigades specially organized to subdue certain tribes on the northern flank of the route who certainly would imperil the security of his line of communication if left alone. This was his invariable custom, and it was greatly owing to the completeness with which these flanking expeditions were carried out that he was able to keep open his connection with Greece. There have been discussions as to the route which he followed. Hyphæstion, in command of the main body, undoubtedly followed the main route which would take him most directly to the plains of the Punjab, which route is sufficiently well indicated in these days as the "Khaibar." We hear very little about his march eastwards.

SKETCH MAP OF ALEXANDER'S ROUTE
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In the days preceding the use of fire-arms the march of a body of troops through defiles such as the Khurd Kabul or the Jagdallak was comparatively simple. So far from such defiles serving as traps wherein to catch an enemy unawares and destroy him from the cliffs and hills on either side, these same cliffs and hills served rather as a protection. The mere rolling down of stones would not do much mischief, even if they could be rolled down effectively, which is not usually the case; and in hand-to-hand encounters the tribespeople were no match for the armoured Greeks. Alexander's operations would preserve his force from molestation on its northern flank, and the rugged ridges and spread of desolate hill-slopes presented by the Safed Koh and other ranges on the south has never afforded suitable ground for the collection of fighting bodies of men in any great strength. General Stewart marched his force from Kabul to Peshawur in 1880 with his southern flank similarly unprotected with the same successful result, his movements being so timed as to give no opportunity for a gathering of the Ghilzai clans. On the northern flank of the Khaibar route, however, there had been large tribal settlements from the very beginning of things, and it was most important that these outliers should feel the weight of Alexander's mailed fist if the road between Kabul and the Indus were ever to be made secure. He accordingly directed his attention to a more northerly route to India which would bring him into contact with the Aspasians, Gauraians, and Assakenians.

We need not follow the ethnologists who identify these people with certain tribes now existing with analogous names. There may very possibly be remnants of them still, but they are not to be identified. They obviously occupied the open cultivable valleys and alluvial spaces which are interspersed amongst the mountains of the Kabul River basin, the Kohistan and Kafiristan of modern maps. The Gauraians certainly were the people of the Panjkora valley, and there is no difficulty in assigning to the Aspasians the first great fertile tract of open valley which would be encountered on the way eastwards. This is Laghman (or Lamghan) with its noble reach of the Kabul River meeting a snow-fed affluent, the Alingar, from the Kafir hills. There is, indeed, no geographical alternative. Similarly with even a cursory knowledge of the actual geographical conformation of the country, it is impossible to imagine that Alexander would choose any other route from Alexandreia towards Laghman than that which carries him past Kabul. The Koh Daman (the skirts of the hills) which intervene between Alexandreia (or Bagram) and Kabul is one of the gardens of Afghanistan. There one may wander in the sweet springtide amidst the curves and folds of an undulating land, neither hill nor plain, with the scent of the flowering willow in the air, and the rankness of a spring growth of flower and grass bordering narrow runlets and irrigation channels; an unwinking blue above and a varied carpet beneath, whilst the song of the labourer rises from fields and orchards. Westward are the craggy outlines of Paghman (a noble offshoot of the Hindu Kush hiding the loveliness of the Ghorband valley behind it), down whose scarred and wrinkled ribs slide waterfalls and streams to gladden the plain. Piled up on steep and broken banks from the very foot of the mountains are scattered white-walled villages, and it is here that you may find later in the year the best fruit in Afghanistan.

In November a gentle haze rests in soft indecision upon the dust-coloured landscape—heavier and bluer over the low-lying fields from which all vegetation has been lifted, lighter and edged with filmy skirts where it rises from the sun-warmed brow of the hills. It is a different world from the world of spring—all utterly sad-coloured and dust-laden; but it is then that the troops and strings of fruit-laden donkeys take their leisurely way towards the city, where are open shops facing the narrow shadowed streets with golden bulwarks of fruit piled from floor to roof. A narrow band of rugged hills shuts off this lovely plain on the east from the only valley route which could possibly present itself to an inexperienced eye as an outlet from the Charikar region to the Kabul River bed, ere it is lost in the dark defiles leading to the Laghman valley. The hills are red in the waning light, and when the snow first lays its lacework shroud over them in network patches they are inexpressibly beautiful. But they are also inexpressibly rough and impracticable, and the valley beyond is but a walled-in boulder-strewn trough, which no general in his senses would select for a military high-road. Alexander certainly did not march that way; he went to where Kabul is, and there, at the city of Nikaia, he made sacrifice to the goddess Athena. If Nikaia was not the modern Kabul it must have been very near it. Does not Nonnus tell us that it was a stone city near a lake? There is but one lake in the Kabul valley, and it is that at Wazirabad close to the city. It is usual to regard Nonnus as a most untrustworthy authority, but here for once he seems to have wandered into the straight and narrow path of truth. So far there can be no reasonable doubt about the direction of this great Pioneer's explorations in Afghanistan. Beyond this, once again, we prefer to trust to the known geographical distribution of hill and valley, and the opportunities presented by physical features of the country, rather than to any doubtful resemblance between ancient and modern place, or tribal, names, for determining the successive actions of the expedition. After the summons to Taxiles, chief of Taxila (itself the chief city of the Upper Punjab), and the satisfactory reply thereto, there was nothing to disturb the even course of Alexander's onward movements but the activity of the mountain tribespeople who flanked the line of route.

The valley of Laghman must always have been a populous valley. From the north the snow-capped peaks of Kafiristan look down upon it, and from among the forest-clad valleys at the foot of these peaks two important river systems take their rise, the Alingar and the Alishang, which, uniting, join the Kabul River in the flat plain, where villages now crowd in and dispute each acre of productive soil. It is difficult to reach the Laghman valley from the west. The defiles of the Kabul River are here impassable, but they can be turned by mountain routes, and Alexander's force, which included the Hyspaspists, who were comparatively lightly armed, with the archers, the "companion" cavalry and the lancers, was evidently picked for mountain warfare. The heavier brigades were with Hyphæstion who struck out by the straightest route for Peukelaotis, which has been identified with an ancient site about 17 miles to the north-east of Peshawur on the eastern bank of the Swat River, and was then the capital of the ancient Gandhara. We are told that Alexander's route was rugged and hilly, and lay along the course of the river called Khoes. Rugged and hilly it certainly was, but the Khoes presents a difficulty. He could not actually follow the course of the Kabul River (Kophen) from the Kabul plain because of the defiles, but he could have followed that river below Butkak to the western entrance of the Laghman valley where it unites with the Alingar, or Kao, River. It is impossible to admit that he reached the Kao River after crossing the Kohistan and Kafiristan, and then descended that river to its junction with the Kabul. No cavalry could have performed such a feat. Geographical conditions compel us to assume that he followed the Kabul River, which is sometimes called Kao above the junction of the Kao River.

It is far more impossible to identify the actual sites of Alexander's first military engagements than it is to say, for instance, at this period of history, where Cæsar landed in Great Britain, as we have no means of making exhaustive local inquiries; but subsequent history clearly indicates that his next step after settling the Laghman tribes was to push on to the valley of the Choaspes, or Kunar. It was in the Kunar valley that he found and defeated the chief of the Aspasians. The Kunar River is by far the most important of the northern tributaries of the Kabul. It rises under the Pamirs and is otherwise known as the Chitral River. The Kunar valley is amongst the most lovely of the many lovely valleys of Afghanistan. Flanked by the snowy-capped mountains of Kashmund on the west, and the long level water parting which divides it from Bajaor and the Panjkora drainage on the east, it appears, as one enters it from Jalalabad, to be hemmed in and constricted. The gates of it are indeed somewhat narrow, but it widens out northward, where the ridges of the lofty Kashmund tail off into low altitudes of sweeping foothills a few miles above the entrance, and here offer opportunity for an easy pass across the divide from the west into the valley. This is a link in the oldest and probably the best trodden route from Kabul to the Punjab, and it has no part with the Khaibar. It links together these northern valleys of Laghman, Kunar, and Lundai (i.e. the Panjkora and Swat united) by a road north of the Kabul, finally passing southwards into the plains chequered by the river network above Peshawur.

The lower Kunar valley in the early autumn is passing beautiful. Down the tawny plain and backed by purple hills the river winds its way, reflecting the azure sky with pure turquoise colour—the opaque blue of silted water—blinking and winking with tiny sun shafts, and running emerald green at the edges. Sharp perpendicular columns of black break the landscape in ordered groups. These are the cypresses which still adorn in stately rows the archaic gardens of townlets which once were townships. The clustering villages are thick in some parts—so thick that they jostle each other continuously. There is nothing of the drab Punjab about these villages. They are white-walled and outwardly clean, and in at least one ancient garden there is a fair imitation of a Kashmir pavilion set at the end of a white eye-blinding pathway, leading straight and stiff between rows of cypress, and blotched in spring with inky splashes of fallen mulberries. The scent of orange blossoms was around when we were there, luscious and overpowering. It was the oppressive atmosphere of the typical, sensuous East, and the free, fresh air from the river outside the mud walls of that jealously-guarded estate was greatly refreshing when we climbed out of the gardens. All this part of the river must have been attractive to settlers even in Alexander's time, and it requires no effort of imagination to suppose that it was here that his second series of actions took place. Higher up the river the valley closes, until, long before Chitral is reached, it narrows exceedingly. Here, in the north, the northern winds rage down the funnel with bitter fury and make life burdensome. The villages take to the hill-slopes or cluster in patches on the flat terraces at their foot. The revetted wall of small hillside fields outline the spurs in continuous bands of pasture, and at intervals quaint colonies of huts cling to the hills and seem ready to slither down into the wild rush of the river below. Such as a whole is the Kunar valley, which, centuries after Alexander had passed across it, was occupied by Kafir tribes who may have succeeded the Aspasian peoples, or who may indeed represent them. All the wild mountain districts west of the Kunar are held by Kafirs still, and there is nothing remarkable in the fact (which we shall see later on) that just to the east of the Kunar valley Alexander found a people claiming the same origin there that the Kafirs of Kashmund and Bashgol claim now.

It was during the fighting in the Kunar valley that we hear so much of that brilliant young leader Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, who was then shaping his career for a Royal destiny in Egypt. With all the thrilling incidents of the actual combat we have no space to deal, and much as they would serve to lighten the prosaic tale of the progress of Alexander's explorations, we must reluctantly leave them to Arrian and the Greek historians. We are told that after the Kunar valley action Alexander crossed the mountains and came to a city at their base called Arigaion. Assuming that he crossed the Kunar watershed by the Spinasuka Pass, which leads direct from Pashat (the present capital of Kunar) into Bajaor, he would be close to Nawagai, the present chief town of Bajaor. Arigaion would therefore be not far from Nawagai. The place was burnt down; but recognizing the strategic importance of the position, he left Krateros to fortify it and make it the residence not only of such tribespeople as chose to return to their houses, but also of such of his own soldiers as were unfit for further service. This seems to have been his invariable custom, and accounts for the traditions of Greek origin which we still find so common in the north-western borderland of India. The story of this part of his expedition reads almost as if it were journalistic. Then, as now, the tribesmen took to the hills. Then, as now, their position and approximate numbers could be ascertained by their camp-fires at night. Ptolemy was intelligence officer and conducted the reconnaissance, and on his report the plan of attack was arranged. This was probably the most considerable action fought by Alexander in the hills north of India. The conflict was sharp but decisive, and the Aspasians, who had taken up their position on a hill, were utterly routed. According to Ptolemy 40,000 prisoners and 230,000 oxen were taken, and the fact that the pick of the oxen were sent to Macedonia to improve the breed there shows how complete was the line of communication between Greece and Upper India. The next tribe to be dealt with were the Assakenians, and to reach them it was necessary to cross the Gauraios, or Panjkora, which was deep, swift as to current, and full of boulders. As we find no mention in Arrian's history of the passage of the Suastos (Swat River) following on that of the Gauraios, we must conclude that Alexander crossed the Panjkora below its junction with the Swat, where the river being much enclosed by hills would certainly afford a most difficult passage. There are other reasons which tend to confirm this view.

The next important action which took place was the siege and capture of the city called Massaga, which was only taken after four days' severe fighting, during which Alexander was wounded in the foot by an arrow. M'Crindle[1] quotes the various names given in Sanscrit and Latin literature, and agrees with Rennel in adopting the site of Mashanagar, mentioned by the Emperor Baber in his memoirs as lying two marches from Bajaor on the river Swat, as representing Massaga. M. Court heard from the Yasufzais of Swat that there was a place called by the double name of Mashkine and Massanagar 24 miles from Bajaor. It is not to be found now, but there is in the survey maps a place on the Swat River about that distance from Nawagai (the chief town in Bajaor) called Matkanai, close to the Malakand Pass, and this is no doubt the place referred to. It is very difficult even in these days to get a really authoritative spelling for place-names beyond, or even within, the British Indian border; and as these surveys were made during the progress of the Tirah expedition when the whole country was armed, such information as could be obtained was often unusually sketchy. If this is the site of Massaga it would be directly on the line of Alexander's route from Nawagai eastwards, as he rounded the spurs of the Koh-i-Mor which he left to the north of him, and struck the Panjkora some miles below its junction with the Swat. There can be little doubt that it was near this spot that the historic siege took place. His next objective were two cities called Ora and Bazira, which were obviously close together and interdependent. Cunningham places the position of Bazira, at the town of Rustam (on the Kalapani River), which is itself built on a very extensive old mound and represents the former site of a town called Bazar. Rustam stands midway between the Swat and Indus, and must always have been an important trade centre between the rich valley of Swat and the towns of the Indus. Ora may possibly be represented by the modern Bazar which is close by. Geographically this is the most probable solution of the problem of Alexander's movements, there being direct connection with the Swat valley through Rustam which is not to be found farther north. Alexander would have to cross the Malakand from the Swat valley to the Indus plains, but would encounter no further obstacles if he moved on this route. Bazira made a fair show of resistance, but the usual Greek tactics of drawing the enemy out into the plains was resorted to by Koenos with a certain amount of success; and when Ora fell before Alexander, the full military strength of Bazira dispersed and fled for refuge to the rock Aornos.

So far we have followed this Greek expedition into regions which are beyond the limits of modern Afghanistan, but the new geographical detail acquired during the most recent of our frontier campaigns enables new arguments to be adduced in favour of old theories (or the reverse), and this departure from the strict political boundaries of our subject leads us to regions which are at any rate historically and strategically connected with it. With Aornos, however, our excursion into Indian fields will terminate. Round about Aornos historical controversy has ebbed and flowed for nearly a century, and it is not my intention to add much to the literature which already concerns itself with that doubtful locality. I believe, however, that it will be some time yet before the last word is said about Aornos. Of all the positions assigned to that marvellous feat of arms performed by the Greek force, that which was advanced by the late General Sir James Abbott in 1854 is the most attractive—so attractive, indeed, that it is hard to surrender it. The discrepant accounts of the capture of the famous "rock" given by Arrian (from the accounts of Ptolemy, one of the chief actors in the scene), Curtius, Diodoros, and Strabo obviously deal with a mountain position of considerable extent, where was a flattish summit on which cavalry could act, and the base of it was washed by the Indus. All, however, write as if it were an isolated mountain with a definite circuit of, according to Arrian, 23 miles and a height of 6200 feet (according to Diodoros of 12 miles and over 9000 feet). The "rock" was situated near the city of Embolina, which we know to have been on the Indus and which is probably to be identified more or less with the modern town of Amb. The mountain was forest-covered, with good soil and water springs. It was precipitous towards the Indus, yet "not so steep but that 220 horse and war engines were taken up to the summit," all of which Sir James Abbott finds compatible with the hill Mahaban which is close to Amb, and answers all descriptions excepting that of isolation, for it is but a lofty spur of the dividing ridge between the Chumla, an affluent of the Buner River, and the lower Mada Khel hills, culminating in a peak overlooking the Indus from a height of 7320 feet. The geographical situation is precisely such as we should expect under the circumstances. The tribespeople driven from Bazira (assuming Bazira to be near Rustam) following the usual methods of the mountaineers of the Indian frontier, would retreat to higher and more inaccessible fastnesses in their rugged hills. There is but one way open from Rustam towards the Indus offering them the chance of safety from pursuit, and undoubtedly they followed that track. It leads up to the great divide north of them and then descends into the Chumla valley leading to that of Buner, and the hills which were to prove their salvation might well be those flanking the Chumla on the south, rising as they do to ever higher altitudes as they approach the Indus. This, in fact, is Mahaban. By all the rules of Native strategy in Northern India this is precisely the position which they would take up.

Aornos appears to have been a kind of generic name with the Greeks, applied to mountain positions of a certain class, for we hear of another Aornos in Central Asia, and the word translated "rock" seems to mean anything from a mountain (as in the present case) to a sand-bank (as in the case of the voyage of Nearkos). No isolated hill such as would exactly fit in with Arrian's description exists in that part of the Indus valley, and no physical changes such as alteration in the course of the Indus, or such as might be effected by the tectonic forces of Nature, are likely to have removed such a mountain. Abbott's identification has therefore been generally accepted for many years, and it has remained for our latest authority to question it seriously.

The latest investigator into the archæological interests of the Indian trans-frontier is Dr. M. A. Stein, the Inspector-General of Education in India. The marvellous results of his researches in Chinese Turkistan have rendered his name famous all over the archæological world, and it is to him that we owe an entirely new conception of the civilization of Indo-China during the Buddhist period. Dr. Stein's methods are thorough. He leaves nothing to speculation, and indulges in no romance, whatever may be the temptation. He takes with him on his archæological excursions a trained native surveyor of the Indian survey, and he thus not only secures an exact illustration of his own special area of investigation, but incidentally he adds immensely to our topographical knowledge of little known regions. This is specially necessary in those wild districts which are more immediately contiguous to the Indian border, for it is seldom that the original surveys of these districts can be anything more than topographical sketches acquired, sometimes from a distance, sometimes on the spot, but generally under all the disadvantages and disabilities of active campaigning, when the limited area within which survey operations can be carried on in safety is often very restricted. Thus we have very presentable geographical maps of the regions of Alexander's exploits in the north, but we have not had the opportunity of examining special sites in detail, and there are doubtless certain irregularities in the map compilation. This is very much the case as regards those hill districts on the right bank of the Indus immediately adjoining the Buner valley both north and south of it. Mahaban, the mountain which in Abbott's opinion best represents what is to be gathered from classical history of the general characteristics of Aornos, is south of Buner, overlooking the lower valley close to the Indus River. Dr. Stein formed the bold project of visiting Mahaban personally, and taking a surveyor with him. It was a bold project, for there were many difficulties both political and physical. The tribespeople immediately connected with Mahaban are the Gaduns—a most unruly people, constantly fighting amongst themselves; and it was only by seizing on the exact psychological moment when for a brief space our political representative had secured a lull in these fratricidal feuds, that Stein was enabled to act. He actually reached Mahaban under most trying conditions of wind and weather, and he made his survey. Incidentally he effected some most remarkable Buddhist identifications; but so far as the identification of Mahaban with Aornos is concerned he came to the conclusion that such identification could not possibly be maintained. This opinion is practically based on the impossibility of fitting the details of the story of Aornos to the physical features of Mahaban. It is unfortunate (but perhaps inevitable) that even in those incidents and operations of Alexander's expedition where his footsteps can be distinctly traced from point to point, where geographical conformation absolutely debars us from alternative selection of lines of action, the details of the story never do fit the physical conditions which must have obtained in his time.

As the history of Alexander is in the main a true history, there is absolutely no justification for cutting out the thrilling incident of Aornos from it. There was undoubtedly an Aornos somewhere near the Indus, and there was a singularly interesting fight for its possession, the story of which includes so many of the methods and tactics familiar to every modern north-west frontiersman, that we decline to believe it to be all invention. But the story was written a century after Alexander's time, compiled from contemporary records it is true, but leaving no margin for inquiry amongst survivors as to details. If, instead of ancient history, we were to turn to the century-old records of our own frontier expeditions and rewrite them with no practical knowledge of the geography of the country, and no witness of the actual scene to give us an ex parte statement of what happened (for no single participator in an action is ever able to give a correct account of all the incidents of it), what should we expect? Some furtive investigator might study the story of the ascent of the famous frontier mountain, the Takht-i-Suliman (a veritable Aornos!), during the expedition of 1882-83, and find it impossible to recognize the account of its steep and narrow ascent, requiring men to climb on their hands and knees, with the fact that a very considerable force did finally ascend by comparatively easy slopes and almost dropped on to the heads of the defenders. Such incidents require explanation to render them intelligible, and at this distance of time it is only possible to balance probabilities as regards Aornos.

Alexander's objective being India, eventually, and the Indus (of India, not of the Himalayas) immediately, he would take the road which led straightest from Massaga to the Indus; it is inconceivable that he would deliberately involve himself and his army in the maze of pathless mountains which enclose the head of Buner. He would certainly take the road which leads from Malakand to the Indus, on which lies Rustam. It has always been a great high-road. One of the most interesting discoveries in connection with the Tirah campaign was the old Buddhist road, well engineered and well graded, which leads from Malakand to the plains of the Punjab—those northern plains which abound with Buddhist relics. If we identify Bazar, or Rustam, with Bazireh we may assume with certainty that a retreating tribe, driven from any field of defeat on the straight high-road which links Panjkora with the Indus, would inevitably retire to the nearest and the highest mountain ridge that was within reach. This is certainly the ridge terminating with Mahaban and flanking the Buner valley on the south, a refuge in time of trouble for many a lawless people. Probability, then, would seem to favour Mahaban, or some mountain position near it. The modern name of this peak is Shah Kot, and it is occupied by a mixed and irregular folk. Here Dr. Stein spent an unhappy night in a whirling snow-storm, but he succeeded in examining the mountain thoroughly. He decided that that position of Mahaban could not possibly represent Aornos, for the following reasons:—The hill-top is too narrow for military action; the ascent, instead of being difficult, is easy from every side; and there is no spring of water on the summit, which summit must have been a very considerable plateau to admit of the action described; finally, there is no great ravine, and therefore no opportunity for the erection of the mound described by Arrian, which enabled the Greeks to fusilade the enemy's camp with darts and stones. Can we reconcile these discrepancies with the text of history?

After the reduction of Bazira Alexander marched towards the Indus and received the submission of Peukelaotis, which was then the capital of what is now, roughly speaking, the Peshawur district. The site of this ancient capital appears to be ascertained beyond doubt, and we must regard it as fixed near Charsadda, about 17 miles north-east (not north-west as M'Crindle has it) from Peshawur. From this place Alexander marched to Embolina, which is said to be a city close adjoining the rock of Aornos. On the route thither he is said by Arrian to have taken "many other small towns seated upon that river," i.e. the Indus; two princes of that province, Cophæus and Assagetes, accompanying him. This sufficiently indicates that his march must have been up the right bank of the Indus, which would be the natural route for him to follow. Arrived at Embolina, he arranged for a base of supplies at that point, and then, with "Archers, Agrians, Cænus' Troop" and the choicest, best armed, and most expeditious foot out of the whole army, besides 200 auxiliary horse and 100 equestrian archers, he marched towards the "rock" (8 miles distant), and on the first day chose a place convenient for an encampment. The day after, he pitched his tents much higher. The ancient Embolina may not be the modern Amb, but Amb undoubtedly is an extremely probable site for such a base of supplies to be formed, whether the final objective were Mahaban or any place (as suggested by Stein) higher up the river. The fact that there is a similarity in the names Amb and Embolina need not militate against the adoption of the site of Amb as by far the most probable that any sagacious military commander would select. A mere resemblance between the ancient and modern names of places may, of course, be most deceptive. On the other hand it is often a most valuable indication, and one certainly not to be neglected. Place-names last with traditional tenacity in the East, and obscured as they certainly would be by Greek transliteration (after all, not worse than British transliteration), they still offer a chance of identifying old positions such as nothing else can offer excepting accurate topographical description. Once again, if Embolina were not Amb it certainly ought to have been.

Alexander's next movements from Embolina most clearly indicate that he had to deal with a mountain position. There is no getting away from it, nor from the fact that the road to it was passable for horsemen, and therefore not insuperably difficult. At the same time he had to move as slowly as any modern force would move, for he was traversing the rough spurs of a hill which ran to 7800 feet in altitude. Further, the mountain was high enough to render signalling by fire useful. The "rock" was obviously either a mountain itself or it was perched on the summit of a mountain. Ptolemy as usual had conducted the reconnaissance. He established himself unobserved in a temporary position on the crest, within reach of the enemy, who attempted to dispossess him and failed; and it was he who (according to the story) signalled to Alexander. Ptolemy had followed a route, with guides, which proved rough and difficult, and Alexander's attempt to join him next day was prevented by the fierce activity of the mountaineers, who were plainly fighting from the mountain spurs. Then, it is said, Alexander communicated with Ptolemy by night and arranged a combined plan of attack. When it "was almost night" of the following day Alexander succeeded in joining Ptolemy, but only after severe fighting during the ascent. Then the combined forces attacked the "rock" and failed. All this so far is plain unvarnished mountain warfare, and the incidents follow each other as naturally as in any modern campaign. It becomes clear that the "rock" was a position on the crest of a high mountain, the ascent of which was rendered doubly difficult by fierce opposition. But it was practicable. Nothing is said about cavalry ascending. Why, then, did Alexander take cavalry? This question leads to another. Why do our frontier generals always burden themselves with cavalry on these frontier expeditions? They cannot act on the mountain-sides, and they are useless for purposes of pursuit. The answer is that they are most valuable for preserving the line of communication. Without the cavalry Alexander had no overwhelming force at his disposal, and it would not be very hazardous if we assumed that the force which actually reached the crest of the mountain was a comparatively small one—much of the original brigade being dispersed on the route.

Dr. Stein found the ascent too easy to reconcile with history. This might possibly be the effect of long weather action of the slopes of mountains subject to severe snow-falls. Twenty-three centuries of wind and weather have beaten on those scarred and broken slopes since Alexander's day. Those twenty-three centuries have had such effect on the physical outlines of land conformation elsewhere as absolutely to obliterate the tracks over which the Greek force most undoubtedly passed. What may have been the exact effect of them on Mahaban, whether (as usual) they rounded off sharp edges, cut out new channels, obliterated some water springs and gave rise to others, smoothing down the ruggedness of spurs and shaping the drainage, we cannot say. Only it is certain that the slopes of Mahaban—and its crest for that matter—are not what they were twenty-three centuries ago. We shall never recognize Aornos by its superficial features. Then, in the Greek story, follows the episode of filling up the great ravine which yawned between the Greek position and the "rock" on which the tribespeople were massed, and the final abandonment of the latter when, after three days' incessant toil, a mound had been raised from which it could be assailed by the darts and missiles of the Greeks. Arrian tells the story with a certain amount of detail. He states that a "huge rampart" was raised "from the level of that part of the hill where their entrenchment was" by means of "poles and stakes," the whole being "perfected in three days." On the fourth day the Greeks began to build a "mound opposite the rock," and Alexander decided to extend the "Rampart" to the mound. It was then that the "Barbarians" decided to surrender.

In the particular translation from which I have quoted (Rookes, 1829) there is nothing said about the "great ravine" of which Stein writes that it is clearly referred to by "all texts," and a very little consideration will show that it could never have existed. No matter what might have been the strength of Alexander's force it could only have been numbered by hundreds and not by thousands, when it reached the summit of the mountain. We might refer to the modern analogy of the expedition to the summit of the Takht-i-Suliman, where it was found quite impossible to maintain a few companies of infantry for more than two or three days. Numbers engaged in action are proverbially exaggerated, especially in the East; but the physical impossibility of keeping a large force on the top of a mountain must certainly be acknowledged. Even supposing there were a thousand men, and that no guards were required, and no reliefs, and that the whole force could apply themselves to filling up a "large ravine" with such "stakes and poles" as they could carry or drag from the mountain-slopes, it would take three months rather than three days to fill up any ravine which could possibly be called "large." General Abbott, as a scientific officer, was probably quite correct in his estimate of the "Rampart" as some sort of a "trench of approach with a parapet." There could not possibly have been a "great mound built of stakes and poles for crossing a ravine." It may be noted that Ptolemy's defensive work on his first arrival on the summit is called (or translated) "Rampart," and yet we know that it could only have been a palisade or an abattis. The story told by Arrian (and possibly maltreated by translators) is doubtless full of inaccuracies and exaggerations, but we decline to believe that it is pure invention. There is nothing in it, so far, which absolutely militates against the Mahaban of to-day (that refuge for Hindustani fanatics at one time, and for the discontented tribesfolk of the whole countryside through all time) being the Aornos of Arrian. No appearance of "precipices" is, however, to be found in the survey of the summit which accompanied Dr. Stein's report, and no opportunity for the defeated tribesmen to fall into the river. The story runs that the defeated mountaineers retreating from the victorious Greeks fell over the precipices in their hot haste, and that many of them were drowned in the Indus. This is indeed an incident which might be added as an effective addition to any tall story of a fight which took place on hills in the immediate neighbourhood of a river; but under no conceivable circumstances could it be adjusted to the formation of the Mahaban hill, even if it were admitted that armoured Greeks were any match in the hills for the fleet-footed and light-clad Indians. Probably the incident is purely decorative, but we need not therefore assume that the whole story is fiction. It has been pointed out by Sir Bindon Blood, who commanded the latest expedition to the Buner valley, that failing Mahaban there is north of the Buner River, immediately overlooking the Indus, a peak called Baio with precipitous flanks on the river side, which would fit in with the tale of Aornos better even than Mahaban. The Buner River joins the Indus through an impassable gorge steeply entrenched on either side, and a mile or two above it is the peak of Baio. So far as the Indus is concerned, that river presents no difficulties, for boats can be hauled up it far beyond Baio—even to Thakot. Looking northward or westward from above Kotkai one sees the river winding round the foot of the lower spurs of the Black Mountain on its left or eastern bank. Beyond is Baio on its right bank, towering (with a clumsy fort on its summit) over the Indus and forming part of a continuous ridge, beyond which again in the blue distance is the line of hills over which is the Ambela Pass at the head of the Chumla valley. (It is curious how the nomenclature hereabouts echoes faintly the Greek Embolina.) Above Baio is the ford of Chakesar, from which runs an old-time road westward to Manglaor, once the Buddhist capital of Swat. It would be all within reach of either Indians or Greeks, so we need not quite give up the thrilling tale of Aornos yet, even if Dr. Stein defeats us on Mahaban.

Then follows the narrative of an excursion into the country of the Assakenoi and the capture of the elephants, which had been taken for safety into the hills. The scene of this short expedition must have been near the Indus, and was probably the valley of the Chumla or Buner immediately under Mahaban, to the north. There was in those far-off days a different class of vegetation on the Indus banks to any which exists at present. We know that a good deal of the Indus plain below its debouchment from the hills was a reedy swamp in Alexander's time, and it was certainly the haunt of the rhinoceros for centuries subsequently, and consequently quite suitable for elephants, and it is probable that for some little distance above its debouchment the same sort of pasturage was obtainable. Most interesting perhaps of all the incidents in Arrian's history is that which now follows. We are told that "Alexander then entered that part of the country which lies between the Kophen and the Indus, where Nysa is said to be situate." Other authorities, however, Curtius (viii. 10), Strabo (xv. 697), and Justin (xii. 7), make him a visitor to Nysa before he crossed the Choaspes and took Massaga. All this is very vague; the river he crossed immediately before taking Massaga was certainly the Gauraios or Panjkora.

There is a certain element of confusion in classical writings in dealing with river names which we need not wait to investigate; nor is it a matter of great importance whether Alexander retraced his steps all the way to the country of Nysa (for no particular reason), or whether he visited Nysa as he passed from the Kunar valley to the Panjkora. The latter is far more probable, as Nysa (if we have succeeded in identifying that interesting relic of pre-Alexandrian Greek occupation) would be right in his path. Various authorities have placed Nysa in different parts of the wide area indicated as lying between the Kophen (Kabul) and the Indus, but none, before the Asmar Boundary Commission surveyed the Kunar valley in the year 1894, had the opportunity of studying the question in loco. Even then there was no possibility of reaching the actual site which was indicated as the site of Nysa; and when subsequently in 1898 geographical surveys of Swat were pushed forward wherever it was possible for surveyors to obtain a footing, they never approached that isolated band of hills at the foot of which Nysa once lay. The result of inquiries instituted during the progress of demarcating the boundary between Afghanistan and the independent districts of the east from Asmar have been given in the R.G.S. Journal, vol. vii., and no subsequent information has been obtained which might lead me to modify the views therein expressed, excepting perhaps in the doubtful point as to when, in the course of his expedition, Alexander visited Nysa. In the first engraved Atlas sheet of the Indian Survey dealing with the regions east of the Kunar River, the name of Nysa, or Nyssa, is recorded as one of the most important places in that neighbourhood, and it is placed just south of the Koh-i-Mor, a spur, or extension, from the eastern ridges of the Kunar valley. From what source of information this addition to the map was made it is difficult to say, now that the first compiler of those maps (General Walker) has passed away. But it was undoubtedly a native source. Similarly the information obtained at Asmar, that a large and scattered village named Nusa was to be found in that position, was also from a native (Yusufzai) source. No possible cause can be suggested for this agreement between the two native authorities, and it is unlikely that the name could have been invented by both. At the same time Nysa, or Nusa, is not now generally known to the borderland people near the Indian frontier, and it is certainly no longer an important village. It is probably no more than scattered and hidden ruins. Above it towers the three-peaked hill called the Koh-i-Mor, whose outlines can be clearly distinguished from Peshawur on any clear day, and on that hill grows the wild vine and the ivy, even as they grow in glorious trailing and exuberant masses on the scarped slopes of the Kafiristan hills to the west.

We may repeat here what Arrian has to say about Nysa. "The city was built by Dionysos or Bacchus when he conquered the Indians, but who this Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the Indians is hard to determine. Whether he was that Theban who from Thebes or he who from Tmolus, a mountain of Lydia, undertook that famous expedition into India ... is very uncertain." So here we have a clear reference to previous invasions of India from Greece, which were regarded as historical in Arrian's time. However, as soon as Alexander arrived at Nysa a deputation of Nysæans, headed by one Akulphis, waited on him, and, after recovering from the astonishment that his extraordinary appearance inspired, they presented a petition. "The Nysæans entreat thee O King, for the reverence thou bearest to Dionysos, their God, to leave their city untouched ... for Bacchus ... built this city for an habitation for such of his soldiers as age or accident had rendered unfit for military service.... He called this city Nysa (Nuson) after the name of his nurse ... and the mountain also, which is so near us, he would have denominated Meros (or the thigh) alluding to his birth from that of Jupiter ... and as an undoubted token that the place was founded by Bacchus, the ivy which is to be found nowhere else throughout all India, flourishes in our territories." Alexander was pleased to grant the petition, and ordered that a hundred of the chief citizens should join his camp and accompany him. It was then that Akulphis, with much native shrewdness, suggested that if he really had the good of the city at heart he should take two hundred of the worst citizens instead of one hundred of the best—a suggestion which appealed at once to Alexander's good sense, and the demand was withdrawn. Alexander then visited the mountain and sacrificed to Bacchus, his troops meanwhile making garlands of ivy "wherewith they crowned their heads, singing and calling loudly upon the god, not only by the name of Dionysos, but by all his other names." A sort of Bacchic orgy!

But who were the Nysæans, and what became of them? In Arrian's Indika he says: "The Assakenoi" (who inhabited the Swat valley east of Nysa) "are not men of great stature like the Indians ... not so brave nor yet so swarthy as most Indians. They were in old times subject to the Assyrians; then after a period of Median rule submitted to the Persians ... the Nysaioi, however, are not an Indian race, but descendants of those who came to India with Dionysos"; he adds that the mountain "in the lower slopes of which Nysa is built" is designated Meros, and he clearly distinguishes between Assakenoi and Nysaioi. M. de St. Martin says that the name Nysa is of Persian or Median origin; but although we know that Assyrians, Persians, and Medes all overran this part of India before Alexander, and all must have left, as was the invariable custom of those days, representatives of their nationality behind them who have divided with subsequent Skyths the ethnographical origin of many of the Upper Indian valley tribes of to-day, there seems no sound reason for disputing the origin of this particular name.

Ptolemy barely mentions Nysa, but we learn something about the Nysæans from fragments of the Indika of Megasthenes, which have been collected by Dr. Schwanbeck and translated by M'Crindle. We learn that this pre-Alexandrian Greek Dionysos was a most beneficent conqueror. He taught the Indians how to make wine and cultivate the fields; he introduced the system of retiring to the slopes of Meros (the first "hill station" in India) in the hot weather, where "the army recruited by the cold breezes and the water which flowed fresh from the fountains, recovered from sickness.... Having achieved altogether many great and noble works, he was regarded as a deity, and obtained immortal honours."

Again we read, in a fragment quoted by Strabo, that the reason of calling the mountain above Nysa by the name of Meron was that "ivy grows there, and also the vine, although its fruit does not come to perfection, as the clusters, on account of the heaviness of the rains, fall off the trees before ripening. They" (the Greeks) "further call the Oxydrakai descendants of Dionysos, because the vine grew in their country, and their processions were conducted with great pomp, and their kings, on going forth to war, and on other occasions, marched in Bacchic fashion with drums beating," etc.

Again we find, in a fragment quoted by Polyænus, that Dionysos, "in his expedition against the Indians, in order that the cities might receive him willingly, disguised the arms with which he had equipped his troops, and made them wear soft raiment and fawn-skins. The spears were wrapped round with ivy, and the thyrsus had a sharp point. He gave the signal for battle by cymbals and drums instead of the trumpet; and, by regaling the enemy with wine, diverted their thoughts from war to dancing. These and all other Bacchic orgies were employed in the system of warfare by which he subjugated the Indians and the rest of Asia."

All these lively legends point to a very early subjugation of India by a Western race (who may have been of Greek origin) before the invasions of Assyrian, Mede, or Persian. It could not well have been later than the sixth century B.C., and might have been earlier by many centuries. The Nysæans, whose city Alexander spared, were the descendants of those conquerors who, coming from the West, were probably deterred by the heat of the plains of India from carrying their conquests south of the Punjab. They settled on the cool and well-watered slopes of those mountains which crown the uplands of Swat and Bajaur, where they cultivated the vine for generations, and after the course of centuries, through which they preserved the tradition of their Western origin, they welcomed the Macedonian conqueror as a man of their own faith and nation. It seems possible that they may have extended their habitat as far eastward as the upper Swat valley and the mountain region of the Indus, and at one time may have occupied the site of the ancient capital of the Assakenoi, Massaga, which there is reason to suppose stood near the position now occupied by the town of Matakanai; but they were clearly no longer there in the days of Alexander, and must be distinguished as a separate race altogether from the Assakenoi. As the centuries rolled on, this district of Swat, together with the valley of Dir, became a great headquarters of Buddhism. It is from this part of the trans-frontier that some of the most remarkable of those sculptures have been taken which exhibit so strong a Greek and Roman influence in their design. They are the undoubted relics of stupas, dagobas, and monasteries belonging to a period of a Buddhist occupation of the country, which was established after Alexander's time. Buddhism did not become a State religion till the reign of Asoka, grandson of that Sandrakottos (Chandragupta) to whom Megasthenes was sent as ambassador; and it is improbable that any of these buildings existed in the time of the Greek invasion, or we should certainly have heard of them.

But along with these Buddhist relics there have been lately unearthed certain strange inscriptions, which have been submitted by their discoverer, Major Deane,[2] to a congress of Orientalists, who can only pronounce them to be in an unknown tongue. They have been found in the Indus valley east of Swat, most of them being engraved on stone slabs which have been built into towers, now in ruins. The towers are comparatively modern, but it by no means follows that these inscriptions are so. It is the common practice of Pathan builders to preserve any engraved or sculptured relic that they may find, by utilizing them as ornamental features in their buildings. It has probably been a custom from time immemorial. In 1895 I observed evidences of this propensity in the graveyard at Chagan Sarai, in the Kunar valley, where many elaborately carved Buddhist fragments were let into the sides of their roughly built "chabutras," or sepulchres, with the obvious purpose of gaining effect thereby. No one would say where those Buddhist fragments came from. The Kunar valley appears at first sight to be absolutely free from Buddhist remains, although it would naturally be selected as a most likely field for research. These undeciphered inscriptions may possibly be found to be vastly more ancient than the towers they adorned. It is, at any rate, a notable fact about them that some of them "recall a Greek alphabet of archaic type." So great an authority as M. Senart inclines to the opinion that their authors must be referred to the Skythic or Mongolian invaders of India; but he refers at the same time to a sculptured and inscribed monument in the Louvre, of unknown origin, the characters on which resemble those of the new script. "The subject of this sculpture seems to be a Bacchic procession." What if it really is a Bacchic procession, and the characters thereon inscribed prove to be an archaic form of Greek—the forgotten forms of the Nysæan alphabet?

Whilst surveying in the Kunar valley along the Kafiristan borderland, I made the acquaintance of two Kafirs of Kamdesh, who stayed some little time in the Afghan camp, in which my own tent was pitched, and who were objects of much interest to the members of the Boundary Commission there assembled. They submitted gracefully enough to much cross-examination, and amongst other things they sang a war-hymn to their god Gish, and executed a religious dance. Gish is not supreme in their mythology, but he is the god who receives by far the greatest amount of attention, for the Kafir of the lower Bashgol is ever on the raid, always on the watch for the chance of a Mahomedan life. It is, indeed, curious that whilst tolerant enough to allow of the existence of Mahomedan communities in their midst, they yet rank the life of a Mussulman as the one great object of attainment; so that a Kafir's social position is dependent on the activity he displays in searching out the common enemy, and his very right to sing hymns of adoration to his war-god is strictly limited by the number of lives he has taken. The hymn which these Kafirs recited, or sang, was translated word by word, with the aid of a Chitrali interpreter, by a Munshi, who has the reputation of being a most careful interpreter, and the following is almost a literal transcript, for which I am indebted to Dr. MacNab, of the Q.O. Corps of Guides:—

O thou who from Gir-Nysa's (lofty heights) was born

Who from its sevenfold portals didst emerge,

On Katan Chirak thou hast set thine eyes,

Towards (the depths of) Sum Bughal dost go,

In Sum Baral assembled you have been.

Sanji from the heights you see; Sanji you consult?

The council sits. O mad one, whither goest thou?

Say, Sanji, why dost thou go forth?

The words within brackets are introduced, otherwise the translation is literal. Gir-Nysa means the mountain of Nysa, Gir being a common prefix denoting a peak or hill. Katan Chirak is explained to be an ancient town in the Minjan valley of Badakshan, now in ruins; but it was the first large place that the Kafirs captured, and is apparently held to be symbolical of victory. This reference connects the Kamdesh Kafirs with Badakshan, and shows these people to have been more widespread than they are at present. Sum Bughal is a deep ravine leading down to the plain of Sum Baral, where armies are assembled for war. Sanji appears to be the oracle consulted before war is undertaken. The chief interest of this verse (for I believe it is only one verse of many, but it was all that our friends were entitled to repeat) is the obvious reference in the first line to the mountain of Bacchus, the Meros from which he was born, on the slopes of which stood the ancient Nysa. It is, indeed, a Bacchic hymn (slightly incoherent, perhaps, as is natural), and only wants the accessories of vine-leaves and ivy to make it entirely classical.

That eminent linguistic authority, Dr. Grierson, thinks that the language in which the hymn was recited is derived from what Sanscrit writers said was the language of the Pisacas, a people whom they dubbed "demons" and "eaters of raw flesh," and who may be represented by the "Pashai" dwellers in Laghman and its vicinity to-day. Possibly the name of the chief village of the Kunar valley Pashat may claim the same origin, for Laghman and Kunar both spread their plains to the foot of the mountains of Kafiristan.

The vine and the ivy are not far to seek. In making slow progress through one of the deep "darras," or ravines, of the western Kunar basin, leading to the snow-bound ridges that overlook Bashgol, I was astonished at the free growth of the wild vine, and the thick masses of ivy which here and there clung to the buttresses of the rugged mountain spurs as ivy clings to less solid ruins in England. The Kafirs have long been celebrated for their wine-making. Early in the nineteenth century, when the adventurer Baber, on his way to found the most magnificent dynasty that India has ever seen at Delhi, first captured the ancient city of Bajaor, and then moved on to the valley of Jandoul—now made historic by another adventurer, Umra Khan—he was perpetually indulging in drinking-parties; and he used to ride in from Jandoul to Bajaor to join his cronies in a real good Bacchic orgy more frequently than was good for him. He has a good deal to say about the Kafir wine in that inimitable Diary of his, and his appreciation of it was not great. It was, however, much better than nothing, and he drank a good deal of it. Through the kindness of the Sipah Salar, the Amir's commander-in-chief, I have had the opportunity of tasting the best brand of this classical liquor, and I agree with Baber—it is not of a high class. It reminded me of badly corked and muddy Chablis, which it much resembled in appearance.

Greek Retreat from India
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CHAPTER V

GREEK EXPLORATION—THE WESTERN GATES OF INDIA

South of the Khaibar route from Peshawur to Kabul and separated from it by the remarkable straight-backed range of Sufed Koh, is an alternative route via the Kuram valley, at the head of which is the historic Peiwar Pass. From the crest of the rigid line of the Sufed Koh one may look down on either valley, the Kabul to the north or the Kuram to the south; and but for the lack of any convenient lateral communications between them, the two might be regarded as a twin system, with Kabul as the common objective. But there is no practicable pass across the Sufed Koh, so that no force moving along either line could depend on direct support from the other side of the mountains. It will be convenient here to regard the Kuram as an alternative to the Kabul route, and to consider the two together as forming a distinct group.

The next important link between Afghanistan and the Indian frontier south of the Kuram, is the open ramp of the Tochi valley. The Tochi does not figure largely in history, but it has been utilized in the past for sudden raids from Ghazni in spite of the difficulties which Nature has strewn about its head. The Tochi, and the Gomul River south of it, must be regarded as highways to Ghazni, but there is no comparison between the two as regards their facilities or the amount of traffic which they carry. All the carrying trade of the Ghazni province is condensed into the narrow ways of the Gomul. Trade in the Tochi hardly extends farther than the villages at its head. About the Gomul there hangs many a tale of adventure, albeit adventure of rather ancient date, for it is exceedingly doubtful if any living European has ever trod more than the lower steps of that ancient staircase. Then, south of the Gomul, there follows a whole series of minor passes and byways wriggling through the clefts of the mountains, scrambling occasionally over the sharp ridges, but generally adhering closely to the line of some fierce little stream, which has either split its way through the successive walls of rock offered by the parallel uptilted ridges, or else was there, flowing gently down from the highlands, before these ridges were tilted into their present position. There are many such streams, and the history of their exploration is to be found in the modern Archives of the Survey of India. They may have been used for centuries by roving bands of frontier raiders, but they have no history to speak of. South of the Gomul, they all connect Baluchistan with India, for Baluchistan begins, politically, from the Gomul; and they are of minor importance because, by grace of the determined policy of the great maker of the Baluch frontier, Sir Robert Sandeman, their back doors and small beginnings in the Baluch highlands are all linked up by a line of posts which runs from Quetta to the Gomul via the Zhob valley. Whoever holds the two ends of the Zhob holds the key of all these back doors. There is not much to be said about them. No great halo of historical romance hangs around them; and yet the stern grandeur of some of these waterways of the frontier hills is well worth a better descriptive pen than mine. I know of one, in the depths of a fathomless abyss, whose waters rage in wild fury over fantastic piles of boulders, tossing up feathers of white spray to make glints of light on the smooth apron of the limestone walls which enclose and overshadow it, which is matchless in its weird beauty. From rounded sun-kissed uplands, where olive groves shelve down long spurs, the waters come, and with a gradually deepening and strengthening rush they swirl into the embrace of the echoing hills, passing with swift transition from a sunny stream to a boiling fury of turgid water under the rugged cliffs of the pine-clad Takht-i-Suliman. Then the stream sets out again, babbling sweetly as it goes, into the open, just a dimpled stream, leaving lonely pools in silent places on its way, and breaking up into a hundred streamlets to gladden the mountain people with the gift of irrigation.

It is impossible to describe these frontier waterways. There is nothing like them to be found amidst scenes less wild and less fantastic than their frontier cradles. But full of local light and colour (and local tragedy too) as they surely are, they are unimportant in the military economy of the frontier, and their very wildness and impassability have saved them from the steps of the great horde of Indian immigrants. When, however, we reach still farther southward to the straight passes leading to Quetta, we are once again in a land of history. It is there we find by far the most open gates and those most difficult to shut, although the value of them as military approaches is very largely discounted by the geographical conditions of Western India at the point where they open on to the Indus frontier.

Quetta, Kalat, and Las Bela, standing nearly in line from north to south, are the watch-towers of the western marches. Quetta and Kalat stand high, surrounded by wild hill country. Magnificent cliff-crowned mountains overlooking a wilderness of stone-strewed spurs embrace the little flat plain on which Quetta lies crumpled. Here and there on the plain an isolated smooth excrescence denotes an extinct volcano. Such is the Miri, now converted into the protecting fort of Quetta. The road from Quetta to the north-west, i.e. to Kandahar and Herat, has to pass through a narrow hill-enclosed space some eight miles from Quetta; and this physical gateway is strengthened and protected by all the devices of which military engineering skill is capable, whilst midway between Quetta and Kandahar is the formidable Khojak range which must always have been a trouble to buccaneers from the north-west. From Quetta to the south-east extends that road and that railway which, intersecting the complicated rampart of frontier hills, finally debouches into the desert plains round Jacobabad in Sind. Kalat is somewhat similarly situated. High amongst the mountains, Kalat also commands the approaches to an important pass to the plains, i.e. the Mula, a pass which in times gone by was a commercial high-road, but which has long been superseded by the Quetta passes of Harnai and Bolan (or Mashkaf). Las Bela is an insignificant Baluch town in the valley of the Purali, and at present commands nothing of value. But it was not always insignificant, as we shall see, and if its military value is not great at present, Las Bela must have stood full in the tide of human immigration to India for centuries in the past. It is a true gateway, and the story of it belongs to a period more ancient than any.

Owing to the peculiar geographical conformation of the country, Quetta holds in her keeping all the approaches from the west, thus safeguarding Kalat. The Kalat fortress is only of minor importance as the guardian of the Mula stairway to the plains of India. It is the extraordinary conformation of ridge and valley which forms the great defensive wall of the southern frontier. Only where this wall is traversed by streams which break through the successive ridges gathering countless affluents from left and right in their course—affluents which are often as straight and rectangular to the main stream as the branches of a pear-tree trained on a wall are to the parent stem—is it possible to find an open road from the plains to the plateau.

For very many miles north of Karachi the plains of Sind are faced by a solid wall of rock, so rigid, so straight and unscalable (this is the Kirthar range) as to form a veritably impracticable barrier. There is but one crack in it. For a short space at its southern end, however, it subsides into a series of minor ridges, and it is here that the connection between Karachi and Las Bela is to be found. These southern Las Bela approaches (about which there is more to be said) are not only the oldest, but they have been the most persistently trodden of any in the frontier, and they would be just as important in future as they have been in the past but for their geographical position. They are commanded from the sea. No one making for the Indus plains can again utilize these approaches who does not hold command of the Arabian Sea. In this way, and to this extent, the command of the Arabian Sea and of the Persian Gulf beyond it becomes vitally important to the security of India. Omitting for the present the Gomul gateway (the story of the exploration of which belongs to a later chapter), and in order to preserve something of chronological sequence in this book, it is these most southern of the Baluchistan passes which now claim our attention.

Until quite lately these seaboard approaches to India have been almost ignored by historians and military strategists (doubtless because so little was known about them), and the pages of recent text-books are silent concerning them. They lead outwards from the lower Indus valleys through Makran, either into Persia or to the coast ports of the Arabian Sea. From extreme Western Persia to the frontiers of India at Quetta, or indeed to the Indus delta, it is possible for a laden camel to take its way with care and comfort, never meeting a formidable pass, never dragging its weary limbs up any too steep incline, with regular stages and more or less good pasturage through all the 1400 or 1500 miles which intervene between Western Persia and Las Bela. From the pleasant palm groves of Panjgur in Makran to India, it might indeed be well to have an efficient local guide, and indeed from Las Bela to Karachi the road is not to be taken quite haphazard; nevertheless, if the camel-driver knew his way, he could not only lead his charge comfortably along a well-trodden route, but he might turn chauffeur at the end of his long march and drive an exploring party back in a motor.

In the illimitable past it was this way that Dravidian peoples flocked down from Asiatic highlands to the borderland of India. Some of them remained for centuries either on the coast-line, where they built strange dwellings and buried each other in earthen pots, or they were entangled in the mass of frontier hills which back the solid Kirthar ridge, and stayed there till a Turco-Mongol race, the Brahuis (or Barohis, i.e. "men of the hills"), overlaid them, and intermixing with them preserved the Dravidian language, but lost the Dravidian characteristics. According to their own traditions a large number of these Brahuis were implanted in their wild and almost inaccessible hills by the conqueror Chenghiz Khan, and some of them call themselves Mingals, or Mongols, to this day. This seems likely to be true. It is always best to assume in the first instance that a local tradition firmly held and strongly asserted has a basis of fact to support it. Here are a people who have been an ethnological puzzle for many years, talking the language of Southern Indian tribes, but protesting that they are Mongols. Like the degenerate descendants of the Greeks in the extreme north-west, or like the mixed Arab peoples of the Makran coast and Baluchistan, these half-bred Mongols have preserved the traditions of their fathers and adopted the tongue of their mothers. It is strange how soon a language may be lost that is not preserved by the women! What we learn from the Brahuis is that a Dravidian race must once have been where they are now, and this supports the theory now generally admitted, that the Dravidian peoples of India entered India by these western gateways.

No more interesting ethnographical inquiry could be found in relation to the people of India than how these races, having got thus far on their way, ever succeeded in getting to the south of the peninsula. It could only have been the earliest arrivals on the frontier who passed on. Later arrivals from Western Persia (amongst whom we may reckon the Medes or Meds) remained in the Indus valley. The bar to frontier progress lies in the desert which stretches east of the Indus from the coast to the land of the five rivers. This is indeed India's second line of defence, and it covers a large extent of her frontier. Conquerors of the lower Indus valley have been obliged to follow up the Indus to the Punjab before striking eastwards for the great cities of the plains. Thus it is not only the Indus, but the desert behind it, which has barred the progress of immigration and conquest from time immemorial, and it is this, combined with the command given by the sea, which differentiates these southern gates of India from the northern, which lead on by open roads to Lahore, Delhi, and the heart of India.

The answer to the problem of immigration is probably simple. There was a time when the great rivers of India did not follow their courses as they do now. This was most recently the case as regards the Indus and the rivers of Central India. In the days when there was no Indus delta and the Indus emptied itself into the great sandy depression of the Rann of Katch, another great lost river from the north-east, the Saraswati, fed the Indus, and between them the desert area was immensely reduced if it did not altogether disappear. Then, possibly, could the cairn-erecting stone-monument building Dravidian sneak his way along the west coast within sight of the sea, and there indeed has he left his monuments behind him. Otherwise the Dravidian element of Central Southern India could only have been gathered from beyond the seas; a proposition which it is difficult to believe. However, never since that desert strip was formed which now flanks the Indus to the east can there have been a right-of-way to the heart of India by the gateways of the west. The earliest exploration of these western roads, of which we can trace any distinct record, was once again due to the enterprise of the Greeks. We need not follow Alexander's victorious footsteps through India, nor concern ourselves with the voyage of his fleet down the Indus, and from the mouth of the Indus to Karachi. General Haig, in his pamphlet on the Indus delta, has traced out his route[3] with patient care, demonstrating from observations taken during the course of his surveys the probable position of the coast-line in those early days.

From Karachi to the Persian Gulf, a voyage undertaken 300 years B.C., of which a log has been kept from day to day, is necessarily of exceeding interest, if only as an indication of a few of the changes which have altered the form of that coast-line in the course of twenty-two centuries. This old route from Arabia to the west coast of India can hardly be left unnoticed, for it illustrates the earliest beginning of those sea ways to India which were destined finally to supplant the land ways altogether. I have already pointed out that, judged by the standard of geographical aptitude only, there is no great difficulty in reaching Persia from Karachi. But geographical distribution of mountain, river, and plain is not all that is necessary to take into account in planning an expedition into new territory. There is also the question of supplies. This was the rock on which Alexander's enterprise split. In moving out of India towards Persia he adopted the same principle which had stood him in good stead on the Indus, viz. the maintenance of communication between army and fleet. Naturally he elected to retire from India by a route which as far as possible touched the sea. This was his fatal mistake, and it cost him half his force.

We need not trouble ourselves further with the ethnographical conditions of that extraordinary country, Makran, in Alexander's time; nor need we follow in detail the changes which have taken place in the general configuration of the coast-line between India and the Persian Gulf during the last 2000 years, references to which will be found in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts for April 1901. Apart from the enormous extension of the Indus delta, and in spite of the disappearance of many small islands off the coast, the general result has been a material gain by the land on the sea in all this part of the Asiatic coast-line.

Alexander left Patala about the beginning of September 326 B.C. to push his way through the country of the Arabii and Oritæ to Gadrosia (or Makran) and Persia. The Arabii occupied the country between Karachi and the Purali (or river of Las Bela), and the Oritæ and Gadrosii apparently combined with other tribes to hold the country that lay beyond the Purali (or Arabius). He had previously done all that a good general can do to ensure the success of his movements by personally reconnoitring all the approaches to the sea by the various branches of the Indus; by pacifying the people and consolidating his sovereignty at Patala so as to leave a strong position behind him entirely subject to Greek authority; and by dividing his force so as to utilize the various arms with the best possible effect. This force was comprised in three divisions; one under Krateros included the heavy transport and invalids, and this was despatched to Persia by a route which was evidently as well known in that day as it is at present. It is never contended by any historian that Alexander did not know his way out of India. On the contrary, Arrian distinctly insinuates that it was the perversity of pride, the "ambition to be doing something new and astonishing" which "prevailed over all his scruples" and decided him to send his crank Indus-built galleys to the Euphrates by sea, and himself to prove that such an army led by "such a general" could force a passage through the Makran wilderness where the only previous records were those of disaster. He had heard that Cyrus and Semiramis had failed, and that decided him to make the attempt.

We can follow Krateros no farther than to point out that his route was by the Mulla (and not the Bolan) Pass to Kalat and Quetta. Thence he must have taken the Kandahar route to the Helmund, and following that river down to the fertile and well-populated plains of lower Seistan (or Drangia) he crossed the Kirman desert by a well-known modern caravan route, and joined Alexander at or near Kirman; for Alexander was "on his way to Karmania" at the time that Krateros joined him, and not at Pura (the capital of the Gadrosii) as suggested by St. John. One interesting little relic of this march was dug up by Captain Mackenzie, R.E., during the construction of the fort on the Miri at Quetta. A small bronze figure of Hercules was brought to light, and it now rests in the Asiatic Society's Museum at Calcutta.

Alexander, as we have said, left Patala about the beginning of September. But where was Patala? Probably it was neither Hyderabad (as suggested by General Cunningham) nor Tatta (as upheld by other authorities), but about 30 miles S.E. of the former and 60 miles E.N.E. of the latter, in which locality, indeed, there are ruins enough to satisfy any theory. From Patala we are told by Arrian that he marched with a sufficient force to the Arabius; and that is all. But from Quintus Curtius we learn that it was nine marches to Krokala (a point easier of identification than most, from the preservation of the name which survived through mediæval ages in the Karak—the much-dreaded pirate of the coast—and can now be recognized in Karachi) and five marches thence to the Arabius. He started in cool monsoon weather. His route, after leaving Krokala, is determined by the natural features of the country as then existing. There was no shore route in these days. Alexander followed the subsequent mediæval route which connected Makran with Sind in the days of Arab ascendancy, a route that has been used as a highway into India for nearly eight centuries. It is not the route which now connects Karachi and Las Bela, but belongs to the later mediæval phase of history. As the sea then extended at least to Liari, in the basin of the Purali or Arabius, we are obliged to locate the position of his crossing that river as being not far south of Las Bela; where in Alexander's time it was "neither wide nor deep," and in these days is almost entirely absorbed in irrigation. This does not, I admit, altogether tally with the five marches of Quintus Curtius. It would amount to over a hundred miles of marching, some of which would be heavy, though not very much of it; but the discrepancy is not a serious one. The Arabius may have been far to the east of its present channel—indeed, there are old channels which indicate that it was so, and it does not follow that the river was crossed at the point at which it was struck. The reason for placing this crossing so far north is that room is required for subsequent operations. After crossing, we are told that Alexander "turned to his left towards the sea" (from which he was evidently distant some space), and with a picked force he made a sudden descent on the Oritæ. He marched one night only through desert country and in the morning came to a well-inhabited district. Pushing on with cavalry only, he defeated the Oritæ, and then later joining hands with the rest of his forces, he penetrated to their capital city. For these operations he must necessarily have been hedged in between the Purali and Hala range, which he clearly had not crossed as yet. Now we are expressly told by Arrian that the capital city of the Oritæ was but a village that did duty for the capital, and that the name of it was Rambakia. The care of it was committed to Hephæstion that he might colonize it after the fashion of the Greeks. But we find that Hephæstion certainly did not stay long there, and could only have left the native village as he found it, with no very extensive improvements.

It would be most interesting to decide the position of Rambakia. What we want to find is an ancient site, somewhere approaching the sea-coast, say 30 or 40 miles from the crossing of the Purali, in a district that might once have been cultivated and populous. We have found two such sites—one now called Khair Kot, to the north-west of Liari, commanding the Hala Pass; and another called Kotawari, south-west of Liari, and very near the sea. The latter has but recently been uncovered from the sand, but an existing mud wall and its position on the coast indicate that it is not old enough for our purpose. The other, Khair Kot, is an undoubted relic of mediæval Arab supremacy. It is the Kambali of Idrisi on the high-road from Armail (now Bela) to the great Sind port of Debal, and the record of it belongs to another history. Nevertheless, Khair Kot is exactly where we should expect Rambakia to be, and quite possibly where Rambakia was. Amongst the coins and relics collected there, there is, however, no trace of Greek inscription; but that this corner of the Bela district was once flourishing and populous there is ample evidence.

From Rambakia Alexander proceeded with half his targeteers and part of his cavalry to force the pass which the Gadrosii and Oritæ had conjointly seized "with the design of stopping his progress." This pass might either have been the turning pass at the northern end of the Hala, or it might have been on the water-parting from which the Phur River springs farther on. I should think it was probably the former, where there is better room for cavalry to act.

Immediately after defeating the Oritæ (who apparently made little resistance) Alexander appointed Leonatus, with a picked force, to support the new Governor of Rambakia (Hephæstion having rejoined the army), and left him to make arrangements for victualling the fleet when it arrived, whilst he pushed on through desert country into the territory of the Gadrosii by "a road very dangerous," and drawing down towards the coast. He must then have followed the valley of the Phur to the coast, and pushed on along the track of the modern telegraph line till he reached the neighbourhood of the Hingol River. We are indebted to Aristobulus for an account of this track in Alexander's time. It was here that the Phœnician followers of the army gathered their myrrh from the tamarisk trees; here were the mangrove swamps, and the euphorbias, which still dot the plains with their impenetrable clumps of prickly "shoots or stems, so thick set that if a horseman should happen to be entangled therewith he would sooner be pulled off his horse than freed from the stem," as Aristobulus tells us. Here, too, were found the roots of spikenard, so precious to the greedy Phœnician followers. These same products formed part of the coast trade in the days when the Periplus was written, 400 years later, though there is little demand for them now.

It was somewhere near the Hingol River that Alexander made a considerable halt to collect food and supplies for his fleet. His exertions and his want of success are all fully described by Arrian, as well as the rude class of fishing villages inhabited by Ichthyophagi, all the latter of which might well be cut out of the pages of Greek history and entered in a survey report as modern narrative. After this we have but slight indications in Arrian's history of Alexander's route to Pura, the capital of Gadrosia. Three chapters are full of most graphic and lively descriptions of the difficulties and horrors of that march. We only hear that he reached Pura sixty days after leaving the country of the Oritæ, and there is no record of the number of troops that survived. Luckily, however, the log kept by the admiral of the fleet, Nearkhos, comes into our assistance here, and though it is still Arrian's history, it is Nearkhos who speaks.

We must now turn back to follow the ships. I cannot enter in detail into the reasons given by General Haig, in his interesting pamphlet on the Indus Delta Country, for selecting the Gharo creek as the particular arm of the Indus which was finally selected for the passage of the fleet seaward. I can only remark that whilst the nature of the half-formed delta of that period is still open to conjecture, so that I see no reason why the island of Krokala, for instance, should not have been represented by a district which bears a very similar name nowadays, I fully agree that the description of the coast as given by Nearkhos can only possibly apply to that section of it which is embraced between the Gharo creek and Karachi.

It is only within very recent times that the Gharo has ceased to be an arm of the Indus. For the present, at any rate, we cannot do better than follow so careful an observer as General Haig in his conclusions. There can be little doubt that Alexander's haven, into which the fleet put till the monsoon should moderate, and where it was detained for twenty days, was somewhere near Karachi. That it was the modern Karachi harbour seems improbable. Of all parts of the western coast of India, that about Karachi has probably changed its configuration most rapidly, and there is ample room for conjecture as to where that haven of refuge of 2000 years ago might actually have been. Let us accept the fleet of river-built galleys, manned with oars, and open to every phase of wind and weather, as having emerged from it about the beginning of October, and as having reached the island of Domai, which I am inclined to identify with Manora.

Much difficulty has been found in making the estimate of each day's run, as given in stadia, tally with the actual length of coast. I think the difficulty disappears a good deal if we consider what means there were of making such estimates. Short runs in the river between known landmarks are very fairly consistent in the Greek accounts. On the basis of such short runs, and with a very vague idea of the effect of wind and tide, the length of each day's run at sea was probably reckoned at so much per hour. There could hardly have been any other way of reckoning open to the Greeks. They recognized no landmarks after leaving Karachi. Even had they been able to use a log-line it would have told them but little. Wind and current (for the currents on this part of the sea mostly follow the monsoon wind) were either against them or on their beam all the way to the Hingol, and they encountered more than one severe storm which must have broken on them with the full force of a monsoon head wind. From the point where the fleet rounded Cape Monze and followed the windings of the coast to the harbour of Morontobara the estimates, though excessive, are fairly consistent; but from this point westward, when the full force of monsoon wind and current set against them, the estimates of distance are very largely in excess of the truth, and continue so till the pilot was shipped at Mosarna who guided them up the coast of Persia. Thenceforward there is much more consistency in their log. It must not be supposed that Nearkhos was making a voyage of discovery. He was following a track that had often been followed before. It was clear that Alexander knew the way by sea to the coasts of Persia before he started his fleet, and it is a matter of surprise rather than otherwise that he did not find a pilot amongst the Malli, who, if they are to be identified with the Meds, were one of the foremost sea-going peoples of Asia. His Phœnician and Greek sailors evidently were strangers to the coast, and some of his mixed crew of soldiers and sailors had subsequently to be changed for drafts from the land forces.

We cannot now follow the voyage in detail, nor could we, even if we would, indicate the precise position of those islands of which Arrian writes between Cape Monze and Sonmiani; some of them may now be represented by shoals known to the coasting vessels, whilst others may be connected with the mainland. I have no doubt myself that Morontobara (the "woman's haven") is represented by the great depression of the Sirondha lake. Between Morontobara and Krokala (which about answers to Ras Kachari) they touched at the mouth of the Purali, or Arabius, not far from Liari, having an island which sheltered them from the sea to windward, which is now part of the mainland. Near by the mouth of the Arabius was another island "high and bare" with a channel between it and the mainland. This, too, has been linked up with the shore formation, and the channel no longer exists, but there is ample evidence of the ancient character of this corner of the coast. Between the Arabius and Krokala (three days' sail) very bad weather was made, and two galleys and a transport were lost. It was at Krokala that they joined hands with the army again. Here Nearkhos formed a camp, and it was "in this part of the country" that Leonatus defeated the Oritæ and their allies in a great battle wherein 6000 were slain. Arrian adds that a full account of the action and its sequel, the crowning of Leonatus with a golden crown by Alexander, is given in his other work, but as a matter of fact the other account is so entirely different (representing the Oritæ as submitting quietly) that we can only suppose this to have been a separate and distinct action from the cavalry skirmish mentioned before.

It must be noted that the coast hereabouts has probably largely changed. A little farther west it is changing rapidly even now, and it is idle to look for the names given by the Greeks as marking any positive locality known at present. Hereabouts at any rate was the spot where Alexander with such difficulty had collected ten days' supplies for the fleet. This was now put on board, and the bad or indifferent sailors exchanged for better seamen. From Krokala, a course of 500 stadia (largely over-estimated) brought them to the estuary of the Hingol River (which is described a winter torrent under the name of Tomeros), and from this point all connection between the fleet and the army appears to have been lost. It was at the mouth of the Hingol that a skirmish took place with the natives which is so vividly described by Nearkhos, when the Greeks leapt into the sea and charged home through the surf. Of all the little episodes described in the progress of the voyage this is one of the most interesting; for there is a very close description given of certain barbarians clothed in the skins of fish or animals, covered with long hair, and using their nails as we use fish-knives, armed with wooden pikes hardened in the fire, and fighting more like monkeys than men. Here we have the real aboriginal inhabitants of India. Not so very many years ago, in the woods of Western India, a specimen almost literally answering to the description of Nearkhos was caught whilst we were in the process of surveying those jungles, and he furnished a useful contribution to ethnographical science at the time. Probably these barbarians of Nearkhos were incomparably older even than the Turanian races which we can recognize, and which succeeded them, and which, like them, have been gradually driven south into the fastnesses of Central and Southern India.

Makran is full of Turanian relics connecting it with the Dravidian races of the south; but there is no time to follow these interesting glimpses into prehistoric ethnography opened up by the log of Nearkhos. Nor, indeed, can we follow the voyage in detail much farther, for we have to take up the route of Alexander, about which very much less has hitherto been known than can be told about the voyage of Nearkhos. We may, however, trace the track of Nearkhos past the great rocky headland of Malan, still bearing the same name that the Greeks gave it, to the commodious harbour of Bagisara, which is likely enough the Damizar, or eastern bay, of the Urmara headland. The Padizar, or western bay, corresponds more nearly with the name Bagisara, but as they doubled a headland next day it is clear they were on the eastern side of the Isthmus. The Pasiris whom he mentions have left frequent traces of their existence along the coast. Kalama, reached on the second day from Bagisara, is easily recognizable in the Khor Khalmat of modern surveys, and it is here again that we can trace a very considerable extension of the land seawards that would completely have altered the course of the fleet from the coasting track of modern days. The island of Karabine, from which they procured sheep, may very well have been the projecting headland of Giaban, now connected by a low sandy waste with the mainland. It could never have been the island of Astola, as conjectured by M'Crindle and others. From Kalama to Kissa (now disappeared) and Mosarna, along the coast called Karbis (now Gazban), the course would again be longer than at present, for there is much recent sand formation here; and when we come to Mosarna itself, after doubling the headland of Jebel Zarain, we find the harbour completely silted up. It may be noted that this western bay of Pasni was probably exactly similar to the Padizar of Urmara or of Gwadur, and that there is a general (but not universal) tendency to shallowing on the western sides of all the Makran headlands. Here they took the pilot on board, and after this there was little difficulty.

In three more days they made Barna (or Badara), which answers to Gwadur, where were palm trees and myrtles, and we need follow them for the present no farther. Colonel Mockler, who was well acquainted with the Makran coast, but hardly, perhaps, appreciated all the changes which the coast-line has undergone (neither, indeed, did I till the surveys were complete), has traced the course of that historic fleet with great care. He has pointed out correctly that two islands (Pola and Karabia) have disappeared from the eastern neighbourhood of the Gwadur headland and one (Derenbrosa) from its western extremity; and he might have added that yet another is breaking up, and rapidly disappearing off the headland of Passabandar, near Gwadur. He has identified Kyiza (or Knidza), the small town built on an eminence not far from the shore, which was captured by stratagem, beyond doubt, and has traced the fleet from point to point with a careful analysis of all existing records that I cannot pretend to imitate. We cannot, however, leave Nearkhos without a passing reference to that island on the coast of the Ichthyophagi, and which was sacred to the sun, and which was, even in those days, enveloped in such a halo of mystery and tradition that even Arrian holds Nearkhos up to contempt for expending "time and ingenuity in the not very difficult task of proving the falsehood" of these "antiquated fables." I have been to that island, the island of Astola, and the tales that were told to Nearkhos are told of it still. There, off the southern face of it, is the "sail rock," the legendary relic of a lost ship which may well have been the transport which Nearkhos did undoubtedly lose off its rocky shores. There, indeed, I did not find the Nereid of such fascinating manners and questionable customs as Nearkhos describes on the authority of the inhabitants of the coast, but sea-urchins and sea-snakes abounded in such numbers as to make the process of exploration quite sufficiently exciting; and there were not wanting indications of those later days when the Meds (now an insignificant fish-eating people scattered in the coast hamlets) were the dreaded pirates of the Arabian Sea, and used to convey the crews of the ships they captured to that island, where they were murdered wholesale. It is curious that the name given by Nearkhos is Nosala, or Nuhsala. In these days it is Astola, or more properly Hashtala, sometimes even called Haftala. I am unable to determine the meaning of the termination to which the numerals are prefixed. Another name for it is Sangadip, which is also the mediæval name for Ceylon. There can be no doubt about the identity of this island of sun worship and historic fable.

We must now turn to Alexander. We left him near the mouth of the Hingol, then probably four or five miles north of its present position, and nearer the modern telegraph line. So far he had almost step by step followed out the subsequent line of the Indo-Persian telegraph, and at the Hingol he was not very far south of it. Near here Leonatus had had his fight with the Oritæ, and Alexander had spent much time (for it must be remembered that he started a month before his fleet, and that the fleet and Leonatus at least joined hands at this point) in collecting supplies of grain from the more cultivated districts north, and was prepared to resume his march along the coast, true to his general tactical principle of keeping touch with his ships. But an obstacle presented itself that possibly he had not reckoned on. The huge barrier of the Malan range, abutting direct on the sea, stopped his way. There was no "Buzi" pass (or goat track) in those days, such as finally and after infinite difficulty helped the telegraph line over, though there was indeed an ancient stronghold at the top, which must have been in existence before his time, and was likely enough the original city of Malan. He was consequently forced into the interior, and here his difficulties began.

We should be at a loss to follow him here, but for the fact that there is only one possible route. He followed up the Hingol till he could turn the Malan by an available pass westward. Nothing here has altered since his days. Those magnificent peaks and mountains which surround the sacred shrine of Hinglaz are, indeed, "everlasting hills," and it was through them that he proceeded to make his way. It would be a matter of immense interest could one trace any record of the Hinglaz shrine in classical writings, but there is none that I know of. And yet I believe that shrine which, next possibly to Juggernath, draws the largest crowds of pilgrims (Hindu and Mussulman alike) of any in India, was in existence before the days of Alexander. For the shrine is sacred to the goddess Nana (now identified with Siva by Hindus), and the Assyrian or Persian goddess Nana is of such immense antiquity that she has furnished to us the key to an older chronology even than that of Egypt. The famous cylinder of Assurbanipal, King of Assyria, tells us that in the year 645 B.C. he destroyed Susa, the capital of Elam, and from its temple he carried back the Chaldean goddess Nana, and by the express command of the goddess herself, took her from whence she had dwelt in Elam, "a place not appointed her," and reinstated her in her own sanctuary at Urukh (now Warka in Mesopotamia), whence she had originally been taken 1635 years before by a conquering king of Elam, who had invaded Accad territory. Thus she was clearly a well-established deity in Mesopotamia 2280 years B.C. Alexander, however, would have left that Ziarat hidden away in the folds of the Hinglaz mountain on his left, and followed the windings of the Hingol River some forty miles to its junction with a stream from the west, which would again give him the chance of striking out parallel to the coast.

We should be in some doubt at what particular point Alexander left the Hingol, but for the survival of names given in history as those of a people with whom he had to contend, viz. the Parikanoi, the Sagittæ, and the Sakæ, names not mentioned by Arrian. Now, Herodotus gives the Parikanoi and Asiatic Ethiopians as being the inhabitants of the seventeenth satrapy of the Persian Empire, and Bellew suggests that the Greek Parikanoi is a Greek transcript of the Persian form of Parikan, the plural of the Sanscrit Parvá-ka—or, in other words, the Ba-rohi—or men of the hills. However this may be, there is the bed of the stream called Parkan skirting the north of the Taloi range and leading westwards from the Hingol, and we need look no farther for the Parikanoi. In support of Bellew's theory it may be stated that it is not only in the heart of the Brahui country, but the Sajidi are still a tribe of Jalawan Brahuis, of which the chief family is called Sakæ, and that they occupy territory in Makran a little to the north of the Parkan. There is every reason why Alexander should have selected this route. It was his first chance of turning the Malan block, and it led most directly westwards with a trend towards the sea. But at the time of the year that he was pushing his way through this low valley flanked by the Taloi hills, which rose to a height of 2000 feet above him on his left, there would not be a drop of water to be had, and the surrounding wilderness of sandy hillocks and scanty grass-covered waste would afford his troops no supplies and no shelter from the fierce autumn heat. All the miseries of his retreat were concentrated into the distance (about 200 miles) between the Hingol and the coast.

The story of that march is well told by Arrian. It was here that occurred that gallant episode when Alexander proudly refused to drink the small amount of water that was offered him in a helmet, because his army was perishing with thirst. It must have been near the harbour of Pasni, once again almost on the line of the present telegraph, that Alexander emerged from the sand-storm with but four horsemen on to the sea-coast at last, and instantly set to work to dig wells for his perishing troops. Thenceforward Arrian tells us only that he marched for seven days along the coast till he reached the well-known highway to Karmania, when he turned inland, and his difficulties were at an end. Now, that well-known highway was almost better known then than it is now. He could only leave the coast near the Dasht River at Gwadur, and strike across into the valley of the Bahu, which would lead him through a country subsequently great in Arabic history, over the yet unsuspected sites of many famous cities, to Bampur, the capital of Gadrosia. From leaving the coast to Bampur the duration of his march with an exhausted force would be little less than a month. Working backward again from that same point (which may be regarded as an obligatory one in his route) the seven days' weary drag through the sand of the coast would carry him no farther than from the neighbourhood of Pasni, and that is why I have selected that point for the historic episode of his guiding his army by chance and emerging on to the shore unexpectedly, rather than the neighbourhood of the Basol River, to which the Parkan route should naturally have led him. He clearly lost his way, as Arrian says he did, or else the estimated number of marches is wrong. We are told by Arrian that he reached Pura, the capital of Gadrosia, on the sixtieth day after leaving the country of the Oritæ. This is a little indefinite, as he may be considered to have left the country of the Oritæ when he started to collect supplies from the northern district, and we do not know how long he was on this reconnaissance. Probably, however, the date of leaving the coast and striking inland up the Hingol River is the date referred to by Arrian, in which case we may estimate that he spent about twenty-four days negotiating the fearful country opened up to him on the Parkan route ere he touched the seashore again. This is by no means an exaggerated estimate if we consider the distance (something short of 200 miles) and the nature of his army. A half-armed mob, which included women and children, and of which the transport consisted of horses and mules and wooden carts dragged by men, cannot move with the facilities of a modern brigade. Nor would a modern brigade move along that line with the rapidity that has distinguished some of our late manœuvres in South Africa. On the whole, I think the estimate a probable one, and it brings us to Bampur, the ancient capital of Gadrosia.

We have now followed Alexander out of India into Persia. Thenceforward there are no great geographical questions to decipher, or knots to be untied. His progress was a progress of triumph, and the story of his retreat well ends with the thrilling tale of his meeting again with Nearkhos, after the latter had harboured his fleet at the mouth of the Minab River and set out on the search for Alexander, guided by a Greek who had strayed from Alexander's army. Blackened by exposure and clothed in rags, Nearkhos was unrecognized till he announced himself to the messenger sent to look for him. Even Alexander himself at first failed to recognize his admiral in the extraordinary apparition that was presented to him in his camp, and could only believe that his fleet must have perished and that Nearkhos and Arkias were sole survivors. We can imagine what followed. Those were days of ready recognition of service and no despatches, and all Persia was open to the conquerors to choose their reward.

After Alexander's time many centuries elapsed before we get another clear historic view into Makran, and then what do we find? A country of great and flourishing cities, of high-roads connecting them with well-known and well-marked stages; armies passing and re-passing, and a trade which represented to those that held it the dominant commercial power in the world, flowing steadily century after century through that country which was fatal to Alexander, and which we are rather apt now to consider the fag-end of the Baluchistan wilderness. The history of Makran is bound up with the history of India from time immemorial. Not all the passes of all the frontiers of India put together have seen such traffic into the broad plains of Hindustan as for certainly three, and possibly for eight, centuries passed through the gateways of Makran. As one by one we can now lay our finger on the sites of those historic cities, and first begin faintly to measure the importance of Makran to India ere Vasco da Gama first claimed the honour of doubling the Cape and opened up the ocean highway, we can only be astonished that for four centuries more Makran remained a blank on the map of the world.

CHAPTER VI

CHINESE EXPLORATIONS—THE GATES OF THE FAR NORTH

There are many gateways into India, gateways on the north as well as the north-west and west, and although these far northern ways are so rugged, so difficult, and so elevated that they can hardly be regarded as of political or strategic importance, yet they are many of them well trodden and some were once far better known than they are now. Opinions may perhaps differ as to their practical value as military or commercial approaches under new conditions of road-making, but they never have, so far, been utilized in either sense, and the interest of them is purely historical. These are the ways of the pilgrims, and we are almost as much indebted to Chinese records for our knowledge of them as we are to the researches of modern explorers.

For many a century after Alexander had left the scene of his Eastern conquests historical darkness envelopes the rugged hills and plains which witnessed the passing of the Greeks. The faith of Buddha was strong before their day, but the building age of Buddhism was later. No mention is to be found in the pages of Greek history of the magnificent monuments of the creed which are an everlasting wonder of the plains of Upper India. Such majestic testimony to the living force of Buddhism could hardly have passed unnoticed by observers so keen as those early Greeks; and when next we are dimly lighted on our way to identify the lines of movement and the trend of commerce on the Indian frontier, we find a new race of explorers treading their way with pious footsteps from shrine to shrine, and the sacred books and philosophic teaching of a widespreading faith the objects of their quest. The Chinese pilgrim Fa Hian was the first to leave a permanent record of his travels. His date is about A.D. 400, and he was only one of a large number of Chinese pilgrims who knew the road between India and China far better than any one knew it twenty-five years ago.

Although the northern approaches to India from the direction of China are rather far afield, yet recent revelations resulting from the researches of such enterprising travellers as Sven Hedin and Stein, confirming the older records, require some short reference to the nature of those communications between the outside world of Asia and India which distinguished the early centuries of our era. In those early centuries there was to be found in that western extension of the Gobi desert which we call Chinese Turkistan, in the low-lying country, mostly sand-covered, which stretches to a yellow horizon northward beneath the shimmering haze of an almost perpetual dust veil, very different conditions of human existence to those which now prevail. The zone of cultivation fed by the streams of the Kuen Lun was wider, stretching farther into the desert. Rivers ran fuller of water, carrying fertility farther afield; great lakes spread themselves where now there are but marshes and reeds, and cities flourished which have been covered over and buried under accumulating shifting sand for centuries. A great central desert there always has been within historic period, but it was a desert much modified by bordering oases of green fertility, and a spread of irrigated cultivation which is not to be found there now.

Amongst the most interesting relics recovered from some of these unearthed cities are certain writings in Karosthi and Brahmi (Indian) script, which testify to the existence of roads and posts and a regular system of communication between these cities of the plain, which must have been in existence in those early years of the Christian era when Karosthi was a spoken language in Northern India. All this now sand-buried country was Buddhist then, and a great city overlooked the wide expanse of the Lop Lake, and the rivers of the southern hills carried fertility far into the central plain. When the pilgrim Fa Hian trod the weary road from Western China to Chinese Turkistan by way of Turfan and the Buddhist city of Lop, he followed in a groove deep furrowed by the feet of many a pilgrim before him, and a highway for devotees for many a century after.

Strange as it may seem, the ancient people of this desert waste—the people who now occupy the cultivated strip of land at the foot of the Kuen Lun mountains which shut them off from Tibet—are an Indian race, or rather a race of Indian extraction, far more allied to the Indo-European than to any Mongol, Chinese, Tibetan, or Turk race with which they may have been recently admixed. Did they spread northward from India through the rugged passes of Northern Kashmir, taking with them the faith of their ancestors? We do not know; but there can be little doubt that the Chanto of the Lop basin and of Turfan is the lineal successor of the people who welcomed the Chinese pilgrims in their search after truth. Buddhist then and Mahomedan now, they seem to have lost little of their genial spirit of hospitality to strangers.

Khotan (Ilchi) was the central attraction of Western Turkistan, one at least of the most blessed wayside fountains of faith, the ultimate sources of which were only to be found in India. Those ultimate sources have long left India. They are concentrated in Lhasa now, which city is still the sanctuary of Buddhism to the thousands of pilgrims who make their way from China on the east and Mongolia on the north as full of devout aspiration and of patient searching after spiritual knowledge as was ever a Chinese pilgrim of past ages. Not only was Western Turkistan full of the monuments and temples of Buddhism scattered through the length of the green strips of territory which bordered the dry steppe of the central depression watered on the north by the Tarim River, and on the south by the many mountain streams which rushed through the gorges of the Kuen Lun, but there was an evident extension of outward and visible signs of the faith to the northward, embracing the Turfan basin, which in many of its physical characteristics is but a minor repetition of that of Lop, and possibly even as far west as the great Lake Issyk Kul. Thus the old pilgrim route to India from Western China, which was chosen by the devotee so as to include as many sacred shrines as could possibly be made to assist in adding grace to his pilgrimage, was a very different route to that now followed by the pious Mongolian or Western Chinaman to Lhasa.

Avoiding the penalties of the Nan Shan system of mountains which guards the Tibetan plateau on the north-east, these early pilgrims held on their journey almost due west, and, skirting the Mongolian steppe within sight of the Tibetan frontier hills, they reached Turfan; then turning southward, they passed on to the Lop Nor lake region by a well-ascertained route, which at that time intersected the well-watered and fertile land of Lulan. There is water still in the lower Tarim and in the Konche River beds, but it has proved in these late years to be useless for agricultural development owing to the increasing salinity of the soil. Several recent attempts at recolonizing this area have resulted in total failure. From the Lop Lake to Khotan via Cherchen the old-world route was much the same as now, but the width of fertility stretched farther north from the Kuen Lun foothills, and the temples of Buddhism were rich and frequent, and thus were pious pilgrims refreshed and elevated every step of the way through this Turkistan region. Khotan appears to have been the local centre of the faith. No lake spread out its blue waters to catch the sky reflections here, but from the cold wastes of Tibet, through the gorges of the great Kuen Lun range, the waters of a river flowed down past the temples and stupas of Ilchi to find their way northward across the sands to the Tarim.

The high ritual of Buddhism in its ancient form was strange and imposing. When we read Fa Hian's account of the great car procession, we are no longer surprised at the effect which Buddhist symbolism exercised on its disciples. Fa Hian and his fellow-travellers were lodged in a sanghârâma, or temple of the "Great Vehicle," where were three thousand priests "who assemble to eat at the sound of the ghantâ. On entering the dining hall their carriage is grave and demure, and they take their seats in regular order. All of them keep silence; there is no noise with their eating bowls; when the attendants give more food they are not allowed to speak to one another but only to make signs with the hand." "In this country," says Fa Hian, "there are fourteen great sanghârâmas. From the first day of the fourth month they sweep and water the thoroughfares within the city and decorate the streets. Above the city gate they stretch an awning and use every kind of adornment. This is when the King and Queen and Court ladies take their place. The Gomâti priests first of all take their images in the procession. About three or four li from the city they make a four-wheeled image car about 30 feet high, in appearance like a moving palace adorned with the seven precious substances. They fix upon it streamers of silk and canopy curtains. The figure is placed in the car with two Bodhisatevas as companions, while the Devas attend on them; all kinds of polished ornaments made of gold and silver hang suspended in the air. When the image is 100 paces from the gate the King takes off his royal cap, and changing his clothes for new ones proceeds barefooted, with flowers and incense in his hand, from the city, followed by his attendants. On meeting the image he bows down his head and worships at its feet, scattering the flowers and burning the incense. On entering the city the Queen and Court ladies scatter about all kinds of flowers and throw them down in wild profusion. So splendid are the arrangements for worship!"[4] Thus writes Fa Hian, and it is sufficient to testify to the strength of Buddhism and the magnificence of its ritual in the third century of our era, when India still held the chief fountains of inspiration ere the holy of holies was transferred to Lhasa and the pilgrim route was changed.

So far, then, we need not look for the influence exercised by the most recent climatic pulsation of Central Asia which has dried up the water-springs and allowed the sand-drifts to accumulate above many of the minor townships of the Lop basin, in order to account for the trend of Asiatic religious history towards Tibet. It was the gradual decay of the faith, and its final departure from its birthplace in the plains of India in later centuries, which sent pilgrims on another track, and left many of the northern routes to be rediscovered by European explorers in the nineteenth century. Most of the Chinese pilgrims visited Khotan, but from Khotan onward their steps were bent in several directions. Some of them visited Ki-pin, which has been identified with the upper Kabul River basin. Here, indeed, were scattered a wealth of Buddhist records to be studied, shrines to be visited, and temples to be seen. The road from Balkh to Kabul and from Kabul to the Punjab was pre-eminently a Buddhist route. Balkh, Haibak, and Bamian all testify, as does the neighbourhood of Kabul itself, to the existence of a lively Buddhist history before the Mahomedan Conquest, and between Kabul and India there are Buddhist remains near Jalalabad which rival in splendour those of the Swat valley and the Upper Punjab. All these places were objects of devout attention undoubtedly, but to reach Kabul via Balkh from Khotan it would be necessary to cross the Pamirs and Badakshan. It is not easy to follow in detail the footsteps of these devotees, but it is obvious that until they entered the "Tsungling" mountains they remained north of the great trans-Himalayan ranges and of the Hindu Kush. The Tsungling was the dreaded barrier between China and India, and the wild tales of the horrors which attended the crossing of the mountains testify to the fact that they were not much easier of access or transit at the beginning of the Christian era than they are now.

The direct distance between Khotan and Balkh is not less than 700 miles, and 700 miles of such a mountain wilderness as would be involved by the passing of the Pamirs into the valley of the Oxus and the plains of Badakshan would represent 900 to 1000 of any ordinary travelling. And yet there appear to be indications of a close connection between these two centres of Buddhism. The great temple a mile or two to the west of Khotan, called the Nava Sanghârâma, or royal new temple, is the same as that to the south-west of Balkh, according to a later traveller, Hiuen Tsiang, while the kings of Khotan were said to be descended from Vaisravana, the protector of the Balkh convent. No modern traveller has crossed Badakshan from the Pamirs to Balkh, but the general conformation of the country is fairly well ascertained, and there can be no doubt that the journey would occupy any pilgrim, no matter how devout and enthusiastic, at least two and a half months, and another month would be required to traverse the road from Balkh via Hiabak, or Baiman, over the Hindu Kush to Kabul.

Now we are told that Fa Hian journeyed twenty-five days to the Tsen-ho country, from whence, by marching four days southward, he entered the Tsungling mountains. Another twenty-five days' rugged marching took him to the Kie-sha country, a country "hilly and cold" in "the midst of the Tsungling mountains," where he rejoined his companions who had started for Ki-pin. It is therefore clear that he did not rejoin them at Kabul, nor could they have gone there; and the question arises—Where is Kie-sha? The continuation of Fa Hian's story gives the solution to the riddle. Another month's wandering from Kie-sha across the Tsungling mountains took him to North India. It was a perilous journey. The terrors of it remained engraved on the memory of the saint after his return to his home in China. Great "poison dragons" lived in those mountains, who spat poison and gravel-stones at passing pilgrims, and few there were who survived the encounter. The impression conveyed of furious blasts of mountain-bred winds is vivid, and many travellers since Fa Hian's time have suffered therefrom. "On entering the borders" of India he came to a little country called To-li. To-li seems to be identified beyond dispute with Darel, and with this to guide us we begin to see where our pilgrims must have passed. Fifteen days more of Tsungling mountain-climbing southwards took him to Wuchung (Udyana), where he remained during the rains. Thence he went "south" to Sin-ho-to (Swat), and finally "descended" into Gandara, or the Upper Punjab.

From these final stages of his journey India-ward there is little difficulty in recognizing that Kie-sha must be Kashmir. In the first place, Kashmir lies on the most direct route between Chinese Turkistan and India. Nor is it possible to believe that the wealth of Buddhist remains which now appeal to the antiquarian in that delightful garden of the Himalayas were not more or less due to the first impulse of the devotees of the early faith to plant the seeds of Buddhism where the passing to and fro of innumerable bands of pilgrims would of necessity occur. Through Kashmir lay the high-road to High Asia, at that time included in the Buddhist fold, where Indian language had crystallized and corroborated the faith that was born in India. Thus it was that glorious temples arose amidst the groves and on the slopes of Kashmir hills, and even in the days of Fa Hian, when Buddhism was already nine centuries old, there must have been much to beguile the pilgrim to devotional study. In short, Kashmir could not be overlooked by any devotee, and whether the direct route thither was taken from Khotan, or whether Kashmir was visited in due course from Northern India, we may be certain that it was one of the chief objectives of Chinese pilgrimage.

Fa Hian says so little about the kingdom of Kie-sha which can be made use of to assist us, that it is not easy to identify the part of Kashmir to which he refers. Twenty-five days after entering the Tsungling mountains would enable him to reach the valley of Kashmir by the Karakoram Pass, Leh, and the Zoji-la at the head of the Sind valley. It is not a matter of much consequence for our purposes which route he took, as it is quite clear that all these northern routes were open to Chinese pilgrim traffic from the very earliest times. The alternative route would be to the head of the Tagdumbash Pamir, over the Killik Pass, and by Hunza to Gilgit and Astor. The Hunza country (Kunjut) has always had an attraction for the Chinese. It has been conquered and held by China, and is still reckoned by its inhabitants as part of the Chinese Empire. Hunza and Nagar pay tribute to China to this day.

If we remember that the pains and penalties of a pilgrimage over any of the Hindu Kush passes, or by the Karakoram (the chief trade route through all time), to India, is as nothing to the trials which modern Mongolian pilgrims undergo between China and Lhasa, over the terrible altitudes of the Tibetan plateau, there will be little to surprise us in these earlier achievements. Pioneers of exploration in the true sense they were not, for the Himalayan byways must have been as well known to them as were the Asiatic highways to Alexander ere he attempted to reach India. We may assume, however, that Fa Hian entered the central valley of Kashmir from Leh, for it gives a reasonable pretext for his choice of a route out of it. It is not likely that he would go twice over the same ground. He witnessed the pomp and pageantry of Buddhist ritual in Kie-sha. The King of the country had kept the great five-yearly assembly. He had "summoned Sramanas from the four quarters, who came together like clouds." Silken canopies and flags with gold and silver lotus-flowers figure amongst the ritualistic properties, and form part of the processional arrangements which end with the invariable offerings to the priests. "The King, taking from the chief officer of the Embassy the horse he rides, with its saddle and bridle, mounts it, and then, taking white taffeta, jewels of various kinds, and things required by the Sramanas, in union with his ministers, he vows to give them all to the priests. Having thus given them, they are redeemed at a price from the priests." No mention is made of the price, but as the Kashmiri of the past has been excellently well described by another pilgrim as a true prototype of the Kashmiri of the present, it is unlikely that the King lost much by the deal.

The description of Kie-sha as "in the middle of the Tsungling range" would hardly apply to any country but Kashmir, and the fact is noted that from Kie-sha towards India the vegetation changes in character. Having crossed Tsungling, we arrive at North India, says Fa Hian, but to reach the "little country called To-li" (Darel) he would have to cross by the Burzil Pass into the basin of the Indus, and then follow the Gilgit River to a point under the shadow of the Hindu Koh range, opposite the head-waters of the Darel. Crossing the Hindu Koh, he would then drop straight into this "little country." Remembering something of the nature of the road to Gilgit ere our military engineers fashioned a sound highway out of the rocky hill-sides, one can sympathize with the pious Fa Hian when recalling in after years the frightful experiences of that journey.

A few miles beyond Gilgit the rough evidences of a ruined stupa, and a still rougher outline of a Buddhist figure cut on the rocks which guard a narrow gorge leading up the Hindu Koh slopes, points to the take-off for Darel. No modern explorer has followed that route, except one of the native explorers of the Indian survey who travelled under the soubriquet of "the Mullah." The Mullah made his way through the Darel valley to the Indus, and describes it as a difficult route. There is little variation in the tale of troubled progress, but "the Mullah" makes no mention of Buddhist relics, nor is it likely that they would have appealed to him had he seen them. There can be little doubt, however, that Darel holds some hidden secrets for future enterprise to disclose. "Keeping along Tsungling, they journeyed southward for fifteen days," says Fa Hian. "The road is difficult and broken with steep crags and precipices in the way. The mountain-side is simply a stone wall standing up 10,000 feet. Looking down, the sight is confused and there is no sure foothold. Below is a river called Sintu-ho (Indus). In old days men bored through the walls to make a way, and spread out side ladders, of which there are seven hundred in all to pass. Having passed the ladders, we proceed by a hanging rope bridge to cross the river." All this agrees fairly well with the Mullah's account of ladders and precipices, and locates the route without much doubt. The Darel stream joins the Indus some 30 to 35 miles below Chilas, where the course of the latter river is practically unsurveyed. Crossing the Indus, Fa Hian came to Wuchung, which is identified with Udyana, or Upper Swat, and there he remained during the rains. The Indus below the Darel junction is confined within a narrow steep-sided gorge with hills running high on either side, those on the east approaching 15,000 and 16,000 feet. There are villages, groups of flat-roofed shanties, clinging like limpets to the rocks, but there is little space for cultivation, and no record of Buddhist remains north of Buner. No systematic search has been possible.

Investigations such as led to the remarkable discovery by Dr. Stein of the site of that famous Buddhist sanctuary marking the spot where Buddha, in a former birth, offered his body to the starving tigress on Mount Banj, south of Buner, have never been possible farther north, on account of the dangerous character of the hill-people of those regions. Other Chinese pilgrims, Song Yun (A.D. 520) and Huec Sheng, have recorded that after leaving the capital of ancient Udyana (near Manglaor, in Upper Swat) they journeyed for eight days south-east, and reached the place where Buddha made his body offering. "There high mountains rose with steep slopes and dizzy peaks reaching to the clouds," etc. "There stood on the mountain the temple of the collected bones which counted 300 priests." But there is no mention of other Buddhist sites of importance in the valley of the Indus. Leaving Udyana, Fa Hian and his companions went south to the country of Su-ho-to (Lower Swat), and finally ("descending eastward") in five days found themselves in Gandhara—or the Upper Punjab. Nine days' journey eastward from the point where they reached Gandhara they came to the place of Buddha's body-offering, or Mount Banj. Such, in brief outline, is the story of one pilgrim's journey across the Himalayas to India. Other pilgrims undoubtedly entered India via the Kabul River valley, but we need hardly follow them. There were hundreds of them, possibly thousands, and the pains and penalties of the pilgrimage but served to add merit to their devotion.

The point of the story lies in its revelation as regards connection between Central Asia and India in the early centuries A.D. Clearly there was no pass unknown or unvisited by the Chinese. Not merely the direct routes, but all the connecting ways which linked up one Buddhist centre with another were equally well known. What has required from us a weary process of investigation to overcome the difficulties of map-making, was to them, if not exactly an open book, certainly a geographical record which could be turned to practical use, and it is instructive to note the use that was made of it. As a pious duty, bristling with difficulty and danger, travel over the wandering tracks which pass through the northern gates of the Himalayas was regarded with fervour; but it may be taken for granted that less pious-minded adventurers than the Chinese pilgrims would most certainly have made good use of that geographical knowledge to exploit the riches of India had such a proceeding been possible. We know that attempts have been made. From the earliest times the Mongol hordes of China and Central Asia have been directed on India, and no gateway which could offer any possible hope of admittance has been neglected. Baktria (Badakshan), lying beyond the mountain barrier, had been at their mercy. The successors to Alexander's legions in that country were swamped and dispersed within a century or two of the foundation of the Greek kingdom; and the Kabul River way to India has let in army after army. But these northern passes have not only barred migratory Asiatic hordes through all ages, but have proved too much even for small organized Mongol military expeditions.

The Chinese hosts, who apparently thought little of crossing the Tibetan frontier over a succession of Alpine passes such as no Western general in the world's history has ever encountered, failed to penetrate farther than Kunjut. The Mongol invasion of Tibet early in the sixteenth century (which is so graphically described in the Tarikh-i-Rashidi by Mirza Haidar) was tentatively pushed into Kashmir via Ladakh, and was defeated by the natural difficulties of the country—not by the resistance of the weak-kneed Kashmiri—much, indeed, as a similar expedition to Lhasa was defeated by cold and starvation. No modern ingenuity has as yet contrived a method of dealing with the passive resistance of serrated bands of mountains of such altitude as the Himalayas. No railway could be carried over such a series of snow-capped ramparts; no force that was not composed of Asiatic mountaineers could attempt to pass them with any chance of success; and these northern lines, these eternal defences of Nature's making may well be left, a vast silent wilderness of peaks, undisturbed by man's puny efforts to improve their strength. Certainly the making of highways in the midst of them is not the surest means of adding to their natural powers of passive obstruction, although such public works may possibly be deemed necessary in the interests of peace and order preservation amongst the "snowy mountain men."

Chinese pilgrims no longer tread those rocky mountain-paths (except in the pages of Rudyard Kipling's entrancing work), and the tides of devotion have set in other directions—to Mecca or to Lhasa; but the fact that thousands of Buddhist worshippers yearly undertake a journey which, for the hardships entailed by cold and starvation between the western borders of China and Lhasa, should surely secure for them a reserve of merit equal to that gathered by their forefathers from the "Tsungling" mountains, might possibly lead to the question whether the plateau of Eastern Tibet does not afford the open way which is not to be found farther west. If a Chinese force of 70,000 men could advance into the heart of Tibet, and finally administer a severe defeat on the Gurkhas (which surely occurred in 1792) in Nepal, it is clear that such a force could equally well reach Lhasa. It is also certain that the stupendous mountain-chains and the elevated passes, which are the ruling features of the eastern entrance into Tibet from China, far exceed in natural strength and difficulty those which intervene between the plains of India and Lhasa. We are therefore bound to admit that it might be possible for an unopposed Chinese force to invade India by Eastern Tibet; possibly even by the valley of Assam. There is, however, no record that such an attempt has ever been made. The savage and untamable disposition of the eastern Himalayan tribes, and their intense hostility to strangers may have been, through all time, a strong deterrent to any active exploitation of their country; and the density of the forests which close down on the narrow ways which intersect their hills, give them an advantage in savage tactics such as was not possessed by the fighting Gurkha tribe in Nepal. But whatever the reason may be, there is apparently no record of any Chinese force descending through the Himalayas into the eastern plains of India by any of the many ways afforded by the affluents of the Brahmaputra. We may, I think, rest very well assured that no such attempt could possibly be made by any force other than Chinese, and that it is not likely that it ever will be made by them. We do not (at present) look to the north-east (to China) for the shadows of coming events in India. We look to the north, and looking in that direction we are quite content to write down the approach to India by any serious military force across Tibet or through the northern gateways of Kashmir to be an impossibility.

The footsteps of the Buddhist pilgrim point no road for the tread of armies. In the interests of geographical research it is well to follow their tracks, and to learn how much wiser geographically they were in their day than we are now. It is well to remember that as modern explorers we are as hopelessly behind them in the spirit of enterprise, which reaches after an ethical ideal, as we are ahead of them in the process of attaining exact knowledge of the world's physiography, and recording it.

CHAPTER VII

MEDIÆVAL GEOGRAPHY—SEISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN

It was about eight centuries before Buddhism, debased and corrupted, tainted with Siva worship and loaded with all the ghastly paraphernalia of a savage demonology, had been driven from India across the Himalayas, that the Star of Bethlehem had guided men from the East to the cradle of the Christian faith—a faith so like Buddhism in its ethical teaching and so unlike in its spiritual conceptions,—and during those eight centuries Christianity had already been spread by Apostles and missionaries through the broad extent of High Asia. Thereupon arose a new propaganda which, spreading outwards from a centre in south-west Arabia, finally set all humanity into movement, impelling men to call the wide world to a recognition of Allah and his one Prophet by methods which eventually included the use of fire and sword. The rise of the faith of Islam was nearly coincident (so far as India was concerned) with the fall of Buddhism. Thenceforward the gentle life-saving precepts of Gautama were to be taught in the south, and east, and north; in Ceylon, Burma, China, and Mongolia after being first firmly rooted in Tibet and Turkistan, but never again in the sacred groves of the land of their birth. And this raging religious hurricane of Islam swept all before it for century after century until, checked at last in Western Europe, it left the world ennobled by many a magnificent monument, and, by adding to the enlightenment of the dark places of the earth, fulfilled a mission in the development of mankind. With it there arose a new race of explorers who travelled into India from the west and north-west, searching out new ways for their commerce, and it is with them now and their marvellous records of restless commercial activity that we have to deal. Masters of the sea, even as of the land, no military and naval supremacy which has ever directed the destinies of nations was so widespread in its geographical field of enterprise as that of the Arabs. The whole world was theirs to explore. Their ships furrowed new paths across the seas, even as their khafilas trod out new highways over the land; and at the root of all their movement was the commercial instinct of the Semite. After all it was the eternal question of what would pay. Their progenitors had been builders of cities, of roads, of huge dams for water storage and irrigation, and directors for public works in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The might of the sword of Islam but carved the way for the slave-owner and the merchant to follow. Thus it is that mediæval records of exploration in Afghanistan and Baluchistan are mostly Arab records; and it is from them that we learn the "open sesame" of India's landward gates, long ere the seaports of her coasts were visited by European ships.

Nothing in the history of the world is more surprising than the rapid spread of Arab conquests in Asia, Africa, and Western Europe at the close of the seventh century of our era, excepting, perhaps, the thoroughness of the subsequent disappearance of Arab influence, and the absolute effacement of the Arabic language in those countries which Arabs ruled and robbed. In Persia, Makran, Central Asia, or the Indus valley, hardly a word of Arabic is now to be recognized. Geographical terms may here and there be found near the coast, surviving only because Arab ships still skirt those shores and the sailor calls the landmarks by old-world names. Even in the English language the sea terms of the Arab sailor still live. What is our "Admiral" but the "Al mir ul bahr" of the Arabian Sea, or our "Barge" but his "Barija," or warship! But in Sind, where Arab supremacy lasted for at least three centuries, there is nothing left to indicate that the Arab ever was there.

The effacement of the Arab in India is chiefly due to the Afghan, the Turk, and the Mongol. Mahmud of Ghazni put the finishing blow to Arab supremacy in the Indus valley, when he sacked Multan about the beginning of the eleventh century; and subsequently the destroying hordes of Chenghiz Khan and Tamerlane completed the final downfall of the Empire of the Khalifs.

Between the beginning of the eighth century and that of the eleventh the whole world of the Indian north-west frontier and its broad hinterland, extending to the Tigris and the Oxus, was much traversed and thoroughly well known to the Arab trader. In Makran we have seen how they shaped out for themselves overland routes to India, establishing big trade centres in flourishing towns, burying their dead in layers on the hill-sides, cultivating their national fruit, the date, in Makran valleys, and surrounding themselves with the wealth and beauty of irrigated agriculture. The chief impulse to Arab exploration emanated from the seat of the Khalifs in Mesopotamia, and the schools of Western Persia and Bagdad appear to have educated the best of those practical geographers who have left us their records of travel in the East; but there are indications of an occasional influx of Arabs from the coasts of Southern Arabia about whom we learn nothing whatever from mediæval histories. It will be at any rate interesting to discuss the general trend of exploration and travel, associated either with pilgrimage or commerce, which distinguished the days of Arab supremacy, and which throws considerable light on the geography of the Indian borderland before its political features were rearranged by the hand of Chenghiz Khan and his successors. This has never yet been attempted by the light of recent investigations, and even now it can only be done partially and indifferently from the want of completed maps. The borderland which touches the Arabian Sea—Southern Baluchistan—has been completely explored and mapped, and the more obvious inferences to be derived from that mapping have already been made. But Seistan, Karmania, the highways and cities of Turkistan (Tocharistan) and Badakshan have not, so far as I know, been outlined in any modern work based on Arab writings and collated with the geographical surveys of the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission and their reports. It was after all but a cursory examination of a huge area of most interesting country that was possible within the limited time devoted to boundary demarcation labours in 1883-85; but the physical features of this part of Asia being now fairly well defined, there is a good deal to be inferred with reasonable probability from the circumstance that highways and cities must ever be dependent for their location on the distributions of topography.

The first impression produced by the general overlook of all the historic area which lies between Eastern Persia and the sources on the Oxus, is one of surprise. There is so little left of this great busy world of Arab commerce. It seems to have dropped out of the world's economy, and certain regions to have reverted to a phase of pristine freedom from sordid competition, which argues much for a decreased population and a desiccated area of once flourishing lands.

There are no forests and jungles in Western Afghanistan, or at least only in restricted spaces on the mountain-slopes, so that there is no wild undergrowth uprooting and covering the evidences of man's busy habitation such as we find in Ceylon and the Nepal Tarai; where may be seen strange staring stone witnesses of the faith of former centuries, half hidden amidst the wild beauty and luxuriance of tropical forest growth. There is nothing indeed quite so interesting. Nature has spread out smooth grass slopes carpeted with sweet flowers in summer, but frozen and windswept in winter; and beneath the surface we know for a surety that the buried remains of centuries of busy traffic and marketing lie hidden, but there is frequently no sign whatever above ground. It is difficult to account for the utter want of visible evidence. In the processes of clearing a field for military action, when it becomes essential to remove some obstructive mud-built village and trace a clear and free zone for artillery fire, it is often found that the work of destruction is exceedingly difficult. Only with the most careful management can the debris be so dispersed that it affords no better cover to the enemy than the village which it once represented. As for effacing it altogether, only time, with the assistance of wind and weather, can accomplish that. But it is remarkable with what completeness time succeeds. I have stood on the site of a buried city in Sind—a city, too, of the mediæval era of Arab ascendency—and have recognized no trace of it but what appeared to be the turbaned effigies of a multitude of faithful mourners in various expressive attitudes of grief and despair, who represented the ancient cemetery of the city. The city had been wiped off the land as clean as if it had been swept into the sea, but the burying places remained, and the stone mourners continue mourning through the centuries.

The architectural order of these Khalmat tombs is quite Saracenic, and the vestiges of geometrical design which relieve the plain surface of the stone work and accentuate the lines of arch and moulding, are all clean cut and clear. At the end of each tomb, set up on a pedestal, the folded turban testifies in hard stone to the faith of the occupant beneath. The sharp edges of the slabs and the clearness of the ornamental carving are sufficient to prove that the age of these tombs and monuments cannot be so very remote, although remote enough to have led to the effacement of the township to which they belong. Sometimes a mound, where no mound would naturally occur, indicates the base of one of the larger buildings. Sometimes in the slanting rays of the evening sun certain shadows, unobserved before, take shape and pattern themselves into the form of a basement; and almost always after heavy rain strange little ornaments, beads, and coins, glass bangles, rings, etc., are washed out on the surface which tell their own tale as surely as does the widespread and infinitely varied remnants of household crockery. This last feature is sometimes quite amazing in its variety and extent, and the quality of the local finds is not a bad indication of the quality of the local household which made use of it. "Celadon" ware is abundant from Karachi to Babylon, and some of it is of extraordinary fineness and beauty of glaze. Pale sage green is invariably the colour of it, and the tradition of luck which attaches to it is common from China to Arabia.

In places where vanished towns were in existence as late as the eighteenth century (for instance, in the Helmund valley below Rudbar), debris of pottery may be found literally in tons. In other places, still living, where generations of cities have gradually waxed and waned in successive stages, each in turn forming the foundation of a new growth, it is very difficult to derive any true historical indication from the debris which is to be found near the surface. Nothing but systematic and extensive excavation will suffice to prove that the existing conglomeration of rubbishy bazaars and ruined mosques is only the last and most unworthy phase of the existence of a city the glory of whose history is to be found in the world-wide tradition of past centuries. And so it happens that, moving in the footsteps of these old mediæval commercial travellers, with the story of their travels in one's hand, and the indications of hill and plain and river to testify to the way they went, and a fair possibility of estimating distances according to their slipshod reckoning of a "day's journey," one may possess the moral certainty that one has reached a position where once there stood a flourishing market-town without the faintest outward indication of it. Without facilities for digging and delving, and the time for careful examination, there must necessarily be a certain amount of conjecture about the exact locality of some even of the most famous towns which were centres of Arab trade through High Asia. Some indeed are to be found still under their ancient names, but others (and amongst them many of great importance) are no longer recognizable in the place where once they palpitated with vigorous Eastern life.

The area of Asia which for three or four centuries witnessed the monopoly of Arab trade included very nearly the whole continent. Asia Minor may be omitted from that area, and the remoter parts of China; but all the Indian borderland was literally at their feet; and we can now proceed to trace out some of their principal lines of route and their chief halting-places in those districts of which the mediæval geography has lately become known.

It is not at all necessary, even if it were possible, to follow the records of all the eminent Arab travellers who at intervals trod these weary roads. In the first place they often copied their records from one another, so that there is much vain repetition in them. In the second place they are not all equally trustworthy, and their writing and spelling, especially in place-names, wants that attention to diacritical marks which in Eastern orthography is essential to correct transliteration. It is perhaps unfortunate that the most eminent geographer amongst them should not have been a traveller, but simply a compiler.

Abu Abdulla Mohamed was born at Ceuta in Morocco towards the end of the eleventh century. Being descended from a family named Idris, he came to be known as Al Idrisi. The branch of the family from which Idrisi sprang ruled over the city of Magala. He travelled in Europe and eventually settled at the Court of Roger II. in Sicily. Here he wrote his book on geography. He quotes the various authors whom he consulted in its compilation, and derived further information from travellers whose accounts he compared and tested. The title of his work is The Delight of those who seek to wander through the Regions of the World, and it is from the French translation of this work by Jaubert that the following notes on the countries lying beyond the western borders of India are taken. This account may be accepted as representing the condition of political and commercial geography throughout those regions at the end of the eleventh century, some eighty years or so after the borders of India had been periodically harried by Mahmud of Ghazni, and not very long before the Mongol host appeared on the horizon and made a clean sweep of Asiatic civilization.

To the west of the Indian frontier in those early days lay the Persian provinces of Makran and Sejistan (Seistan), which two provinces between them appear to represent a great part of modern Baluchistan. The "Belous" were not yet in Baluchistan; they lived north of the mountains occupied by the "Kufs," with whom they are invariably associated in Arab geography. "The Kufs," says Idrisi, "are the only people who do not speak Persian in the province of Kerman. Their mountains reach to the Persian Gulf, being bordered on the north by the country of Najirman (?Nakirman), on the south and east by the sea and the Makran deserts, on the west by the sea and the 'Belous' country and the districts of Matiban and Hormuz." These are doubtless the "Bashkird" mountains, and the "species of Kurd, brave and savage" which inhabited them under the name of Kufs probably represent the progenitors of the present inhabitants.

The "Bolous" or "Belous" lived in the plains to the north "right up to the foot of the mountains," and these are the people (according to Mr. Longworth Dames) who, hailing originally from the Caspian provinces, are the typical Baluch tribespeople of to-day.

These mountains, which Idrisi calls the "cold mountains," extend to the north-west of Jirift and are "fertile, productive, and wooded." "It is a country where snow falls every year," and of which "the inhabitants are virtuous and innocent." There have been changes since Idrisi's time, both moral and physical, but here is a strong item of evidence in favour of the theory of the gradual desiccation which has enveloped Southern Baluchistan and dried up the water-springs of Makran. What Idrisi called the "Great Desert" is comprehensive. All the great central wastes of Persia, including the Kerman desert as well as the basin of the Helmund south of the hills, the frontier hills of the Sind border up to Multan, were a part of it, and they were inhabited by nomadic tribes of "thieves and brigands."

Modern Seistan is a flat, unwholesome country, distributed geographically on either side of the Helmund between Persia and Afghanistan. It owes its place in history and its reputation for enormous productiveness to the fact that it is the great central basin of Afghanistan, where the Helmund and other Afghan rivers run to a finish in vast swamps, or lagoons. Surrounded by deserts, Seistan is never waterless, and there was, in days which can hardly be called ancient, a really fine system of irrigation, which fertilized a fairly large tract of now unproductive land on the Persian side of the river. The amount of land thus brought under cultivation was considerable, but not considerable enough to justify the historic reputation which Seistan has always enjoyed as the "Granary of Asia." This traditional wealth was no doubt exaggerated from the fact that the fertility of Seistan (like that of the Herat valley, which is after all but an insignificant item in Afghan territory) was in direct contrast to the vast expanse of profitless desert with which it was surrounded—a green oasis in the midst of an Asiatic wilderness.

The Helmund has taken to itself many channels in the course of measurable time. Its ancient beds have been traced and mapped, and with them have been found evidences of closely-packed townships and villages, where the shifting waters and consequent encroachment of sand-waves leave no sign of life at present.

Century after century the same eternal process of obliteration and renovation has proceeded. Millions of tons of silt have been deposited in this great alluvial basin. Levels have changed and the waters have wandered irresponsibly into a network of channels westward. Then the howling, desiccating winds of the north-west have carried back sand-waves and silt, burying villages and filling the atmosphere for hundreds of miles southward with impalpable dust, crossing the Helmund deserts even to the frontier of India. There is no measurable scale for the force of the Seistan winds. They scoop up the sand and sweep clean the surface of the earth, polishing the rounded edges of the ragged walls of the Helmund valley ruins. It is a notable fact that no part of these ruins face the wind. All that is left of palaces and citadels stands "end on" to the north-west. For a few short months in the year the wind is modified, and then there instantly arises the plague of insects which render life a burden to every living thing. And yet Seistan has played a most important part in the history of Asia, and may play an important rôle again.

Arab records are very full of Seistan. The earliest of them that give any serious geographical information are the records of Ibn Haukel, but there are certainly indications in his account which engender a suspicion that he never really visited the country. He mentions the capital Zarinje (of which the ruins cover an enormous area to the east of Nasratabad, the present capital) and writes of it as a very large town with five gates, one of which "leads to Bist." There were extensive fortifications, and a bazaar of which he reckons the annual revenue to be 1000 direms.

There were canals innumerable, and always the wind and the windmills. It is curious that he traces the Helmund as running to Seistan first and then to the Darya-i-Zarah. This is in fact correct, only the Darya-i-Zarah (or Gaod-i-Zireh, as we know it) receives no water from the Helmund until the great Hamún (lagoons) to the north of Nasratabad are filled to overflow. He also mentions two rivers as flowing into the Zarah—one from Farah (an important place in his time), which is impossible, as it would have to cross the Helmund; and one from Ghur. This indicates almost certainly that the name Zarah was not confined, as it is now, to the great salt swamp south of Rudbar on the Helmund, but it included the Hamúns north of Nasratabad, into which the Farah River and the Ghur River do actually empty themselves. At present these two great lake systems are separated by about 120 miles of Helmund River basin, and are only connected occasionally in flood time by means of the overflow (called Shelag) already referred to. The mention of Bist, and of the bridge of boats across the river at that point, is important, for it is clear that about the year A.D. 950 one high-road for trade eastward was across the desert, i.e. via the Khash Rud valley from Zarinje to about the meridian of 63 E.L. and then straight over the desert to Bist (Kala Bist of modern mapping). The further mention of robats (or resting-places) en route, indicates that it was well kept up and a much traversed high-road. Subsequently Girishk appears to have become the popular crossing-place of the river, but it is well to remember that the earlier route still exists, and could readily be made available for a flank march on Kandahar.

From Idrisi's writings we learn that a century later, i.e. about the end of the eleventh century, the Seistan province extended far beyond its present limits. Bamian and Ghur (i.e. the central hills of Afghanistan) were vis-à-vis to that province; Farah was included; and probably the whole line of the frontier hills from the Sulimanis, opposite Multan, to Sibi and Kalat. It was an enormous province, and a new light breaks on its traditional wealth in grain and agricultural produce when we understand its vast extent.

The regions of Ghur and Dawar bordered it to the north, and there is a word or two to be said about both hereafter. Ghur in the eleventh century included the valley of Herat and all the wedge of mountainous country south of it to Dawar, but how far Seistan extended into the heart of the mountain system which culminates to the south-west of Kabul it is difficult to say. It is difficult to understand the statement that Bamian, for instance, bordered Seistan, with Ghur in between, unless, indeed, in these early days of Ghur's history (for Ghur was only conquered by the Arabs in A.D. 1020, and was still far from intertwining its history with that of Ghazni when Idrisi wrote) the greatness of Bamian overshadowed the light of the lesser valleys of Ghur, and Bamian was the ruling province of Central Afghanistan. This, indeed, seems possible. The district of Dawar to the south of Ghur has always been something of a mystery to geographers. Described by Idrisi as "vast, rich, and fertile," and "the line of defence on the side of Ghur, Baghnein, and Khilkh," it would be impossible to place it without a knowledge of the towns mentioned, were it not that we are told that Derthel, one of the chief towns of Dawar, is on the Helmund, and that one crosses the river there "in order to reach Sarwan." This at once indicates the traditional ford at Girishk as the crossing-place, and Zamindawar as the Dawar of Idrisi. Khilkh then becomes intelligible also as a town of the Khilkhi (the people who then occupied Dawar, described as Turkish by Idrisi, and probably identified with the modern Ghilzai), and finds its modern representative in the Kalat-i-Ghilzai which crowns the well-known rock on the road from Kandahar to Kabul. "The country is inhabited by a people called Khilkh," says Idrisi. "The Khilkhs are of a Turkish race, who from a remote period have inhabited this country, and whose habitations are spread to the north of India on the flank of Ghur and in western Seistan." Thus the position of the Ghilzai in the ethnography of Central Afghanistan appears to have been established long before the days of Mongol irruption. Then as now they formed a very important tribal community.

It is, however, sometimes difficult to reconcile Idrisi's account of the routes followed by his countrymen in this part of Asia with existing geographical features. Deserts and mountains must have been much the same as they are now, and the best, if not the only, way to unravel the geographical tangle is to take his itinerary and see where it leads us. Of Baghnein on the southern borders of Seistan, he says it is an "agreeable country, fertile and abundant in fruits." From there (i.e. the country, not the town) to Derthel one reckons one day's journey through the nomad tribes of Bechinks, Derthel being "situated on the banks of the Helmund and one of the chief towns of Dawar."

So we have to cross an open uncultivated region for 40 miles or so from Baghnein to reach Derthel, on the Helmund. Again, "one crosses the Helmund at Derthel to reach Sarwan—a town situated about one day's journey off," on which depends a territory which produces everything in abundance. "Sarwan is bigger than Fars, and more rich in fruit and all sorts of productions. Grapes are transported to Bost (or Bist), a town two days distant passing by Firozand, which possesses a big market, and is on the traveller's right as he travels to Benjawai, which is vis-à-vis to Derthel." "Rudhan (?Rudbar) is a small town south of the Helmund."

The Helmund valley has been surveyed from Zamindawar to its final exit into the Seistan lagoons, and we know that at Girishk there is a very ancient ford, which now marks, and has always marked, the great highway from Kandahar to Herat. South of Girishk, at the junction of the Arghandab with the Helmund, we find extensive and ancient ruins at Kala Bist; and south of that again there are many ruins at intervals in the Helmund valley; but these latter are comparatively recent, dating from the time of the Kaiani Maliks of the eighteenth century.

Assuming that the Helmund fords have remained constant, and placing Derthel on one side of the river at Girishk and Benjawai on the other, we find on our modern maps that from the ford it is a possible day's journey to Kala Sarwan, higher up the Helmund, where "fruit and grapes are to be had in abundance," and from whence they might certainly have been sent to Bist, where grapes do not grow. Baghnein, separated from Derthel by a strip of nomad country, one day's journey wide, might thus be on either side the Helmund; but its contiguity to Ghur seems to favour a position to the west, rather than to the east, of the river, somewhere east of the plains of Bukwa about Washir.

Now it is certain that no Arab traveller, crossing the Helmund desert from the west by the direct route recently exploited in British Indian interests below Kala Bist and south of the river, could by any possibility have reached a grape-growing and highly-cultivated country in one day's journey. The inference, then, is tolerably clear. Arab traders and travellers never made use of this southern route. Nor should we ourselves make use of such a route as that via Nushki and the Koh-i-Malik Siah, were we not forced into it by Afghan policy. The natural high-road from the east of Persia and Herat to India is via the plains of Kandahar and the ford of Girishk, and the Arabs, with all Khorasan at their feet, were not likely to travel any other way.

Undoubtedly the system of approach to the Indus valley, open to Arab traffic from Syria and Bagdad, most generally used and most widely recognized was that through the Makran valleys to Karachi and Sind, whilst the inland route, via Persia and Seistan, made the well-known ford of the Helmund at Girishk, or the boat bridge at Kala Bist, its objective, and passed over the river to the plains about Kandahar. But it is a very remarkable, and possibly a significant, fact that the continuation of the route to Sind and the Indus valley from the plains about Kandahar is not mentioned by any Arab writer. Did the Arabs descend through any of the well-known passes of the frontier—the Mulla, Bolan, Saki-Sarwar, or Gomul—into the plains of India? Possibly they did so; but in that case it is difficult to account for so important a geographical feature as the frontier passes of Sind being ignored by the greatest geographer of his day.

Following Idrisi's description of the Helmund province we have a brief itinerary from the Helmund ford (Derthel or Benjawai) to Ghazni, said to be nine days' journey inland. None of the places mentioned are to be identified in modern maps except Cariat, which is more than probably Kariut, a rich and fertile district in the Arghandab valley in the direct line to Kalat-i-Ghilzai. This route passes well to the north-east of Kandahar, which was apparently of little account in Idrisi's days. Although there are extensive ruins at Kushk-i-Nakhud, indicated by a huge artificial mound half-way between Girishk and Kandahar, there is nothing in Idrisi's writings by which they can be identified.

Ghazni was then a large town "surrounded by mud walls and a ditch. There are many houses and permanent markets in Ghazni; much business is done there. It is one of the 'entrepots' of India. Kabul is nine days' journey from it." This is not much to say of the city which had been enriched by the spoils carried away from Muttra and Somnath, and by the treasures amassed during seventeen fierce raids of that Mahmud who, by repeated conquests, made all Northern and Western India contribute to his treasury.

Later, in 1332, the Arab traveller, Ibn Batuta, writes of Ghazni as a small town set in a waste of ruins—a description which fits it not inaptly at the present day; but in Idrisi's time, before the wars with Ghur led to its destruction, whilst still the wealth of a great part of India supported its magnificence, and whilst it was still the theme of glowing panegyric by contemporary historians, one would expect a rather more enthusiastic notice. But even Kabul (nine days' journey distant from Ghazni) is only recognized as "L'une des grandes villes de l'Inde, entourée de murs," with a "bonne citadelle et au dehors divers faubourgs."[5]

There is little to interest us, however, in tracing out the routes that linked up Ghazni and Kabul with the Helmund. They have been the same through all time, with just the difference of place-names. Towns and villages, caravanserais and posts, have come and gone, but that historic road has been marked out by Nature as one of the grandest high-roads in Asia, from the days of Alexander to those of Roberts. Two minars tapering to the sky on the plain before Ghazni are all that are left of its ancient glories, and one cannot but contrast the scattered debris of that once so famous city with the solid endurance of the far greater and older architectural efforts in Egypt and Assyria. Southern Afghanistan is indeed singularly poor and empty of historic monuments. Even now were Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat, its three great cities, to be flattened out by a widespread earthquake there would be little that was not of Buddhist origin left for the future archæologist to make a stir about.

Idrisi writes of the Kingdom of Ghur as apart from Herat, although a great part of the long Herat valley was certainly included. He calls it a country "mountainous and well inhabited, where one finds springs, rivers, and gardens—easy to defend and very fertile. There are many cultivated fields and flocks. The inhabitants speak a language which is not that of the people of Khorasan, and they are not Mohammedans." Who were they? The Khilkhis or Ghilzais we know at that time overspread the southern hills of Dawar; but who were the people speaking a strange language in the land of the Chahar Aimak where now dwell the Taimanis, unless they were the Taimanis themselves whose traditions date from the time of Moses?

More recently the Ghilzais have left Zamindawar, and the Taimanis have been pressed backward and upward into the central hills by the Afghan Durani clans, who circle round westward, forming a fringe on the foothills between Herat and Kandahar, and who have now completely monopolized Zamindawar. Here, indeed, the truculent Nurzai and Achakzai, and other elements of the Durani section of Afghan ethnography, flourish exceedingly, and it is in this corner of Afghanistan, bordering on the Herat highway to India, that nearly all the fanatics and ghazis of the country are bred. They presented so turbulent and uncompromising a front to strangers in 1882 that there was great difficulty in getting a fair survey of the land of the Chahar Aimak or of Zamindawar.

The mediæval provinces of Ghur and Bamain figure so largely in the records of Arab geography, and appear to have been so fully open to commerce during the centuries succeeding the Arab conquests, that one naturally wonders whether there can have been any remarkable change in the physical configuration of those regions which, in these later days, has rendered them more inaccessible and unapproachable. The Arab accounts of trade routes flit easily from point to point, taking little reckoning of long distances and gigantic ice-bound passes, or the perils of a treacherous climate. An itinerary which deals with stupendous mountains and extreme altitudes has little more of descriptive illustration in these Arab records than such as would apply to camel tracks across the sandy desert or over the flat plain. Nor is the distance which figures as a "day's journey" sensibly changed to suit the route. Forty miles or so across the backbone of the Hindu Kush is written of in much the same terms as if it were forty miles over the plains. Giving the Arab travellers all credit for far greater powers of endurance and determination than we moderns possess, we must still believe that there is a great deal of exaggeration (or forgetfulness) in these heroic records of the past. It is unlikely that the physical conditions of the country have materially changed.

So little has been written of this central region of modern Afghanistan (within which lie the ruins of more than one kingdom), so little has it been traversed by modern explorers, that it may be useful to give some slight general description of the country with which these records deal, including Bamain and Kabul and the mountain system occupied by the Taimani and Hazara tribes as well as the prolific region of Zamindawar with the routes which traverse it.

No part of Afghanistan has been subject to more speculative theories, or requires more practical elucidation, than this mountain region in which so large a share of the drama of Afghan history has been played. Before the days of the Anglo-Russian agreement on the subject of the northern boundaries of Afghanistan nothing was known of its geography, beyond what might be gathered from the doubtful records of Ferrier's journey—and that was very little. The geography of a country shapes its history just as surely in the East as in the West, and we have consequently much new light thrown on the interesting story of the rise and fall of the Ghur dynasties by the fairly comprehensive surveys of the region of their turbulent activities which were carried out in 1882-83.

From these sources we obtain a very fair idea of the general conformation of Central Afghanistan, i.e. that part of Afghanistan which is occupied by the tribes known as the Chahar Aimak, i.e. the Jamshidis, the Hazaras, Firozkohis, and Taimanis. It consists in the first place of a huge irregular tableland—or uplift—which has been deeply scored and eroded by centuries of river action, the rivers radiating from the central mass of the Koh-i-Babar to the west of Kabul and flowing in deep valleys either directly northward towards the Oxus, due west towards Herat (eventually to turn northward), or south-west in irregular but more or less parallel lines to the Helmund lagoons in Seistan.

The Kabul River basin also finds its head near the same group of river sources. The central mountain mass, the Koh-i-Babar, is high, rocky, generally snow-capped and impassable. To the north it sends down long, barren, and comparatively gentle spurs to the main plateau level, which is deeply cut into by the northern system of rivers, including the Murghab and the Balkh Ab. But the strangest feature in this network of hydrography is the long, deep, narrow valley (almost ditch-like in its regularity) which has been eroded by the Hari Rud River as it makes its way due west, cutting off the sources of the northern group from those of the Helmund or south-western group. It is a most remarkable valley, depressed to a depth of 1000 to 2000 feet below the general plateau level, bounded on the north by a comparatively level line of red-faced cliffs, and on the south by another straight flat-backed range called the Band-i-Baian (or farther west, the Sufed Koh), which has been carved into the semblance of a range by the parallel valleys of the Hari Rud on the north and the Tagao Ishlan on the south, which hug the range between them.

No affluents of any consequence join either stream. Either separate or together they make their way with straight determination westward towards Herat. South of this curious ditch rise the many streamlets which work their way, sometimes through comparatively open valleys where the floor level has been raised by the centuries of detritus, sometimes through steep and narrow gorges where the harder rock of the plateau formation presents more difficulties to erosion, into the great Helmund basin. These are affluents of the Adraskand, the Farah Rud, and the Helmund, all of which have the same bourne in the Seistan depression. High up between the Farah Rud and the Helmund affluents isolated rugged peaks and short ranges crease and crumple the surface of the inhospitable land of the Hazaras, who occupy all the highest of the uplands and all the sources of the streams, a hardy, handy race of Mongols, living in wild seclusion, but proving themselves to be one of the most useful communities amongst the many in Afghanistan. We have some of them as sepoys in the Indian Army. Lower down in the same river basins, where the gentle grass-covered valleys sweep up to the crests of the hills, cultivation becomes possible. Here flocks of sheep dot the hill-sides, and the land is open and free; but there are still isolated and detached ribs of rocky eminence rising to 11,000 and 12,000 feet, maintaining the mountainous character of the scenery, and rivers are still locked in the embrace of occasional gorges which admit of no passing by. This is the land of that very ancient people, the Taimanis.

The fierce and lawless Firozkohis live in the Murghab basin on the plateau north of the Hari Rud, the Jamshidis to the west of them in the milder climate of the lower hills, into which the plateau subsides.

Whilst we are chiefly concerned in tracing out the mediæval commercial routes of Afghanistan, we may briefly summarize the events which prove that those traversed between Herat and the central kingdoms were important routes, worn smooth by the feet of armies as well as by the tread of pack-laden khafilas. They are still very rough and they present solid difficulties here and there, but in the main they are passable commercial roads, although little commerce wends its way about them now.

In the Middle Ages the Kingdom of Ghur included the Herat valley as far as Khwaja Chist above Obeh in the valley of the Hari Rud, as well as all the hill country to the south-east. About the earliest mention of Ghur by any traveller is that of Ibn Haukel, who speaks of Jebel al Ghur, and talks of plains, ring-fenced with mountains, fruitful in cattle and crops, and inhabited by infidels (i.e. non-Mussulmans). The later history of Ghur is inextricably intertwined with that of Ghazni.

Mahmud of Ghazni frequently invaded the hills of Ghur which lay to the west of him, but never made any practical impression on the Ghuri tribespeople. In 1020, however, Mahomedans conquered Ghur effectually from Herat. About a century later (this is after the time of Idrisi, whose records we are following) a member of the ruling Ghuri family (Shansabi) was recognized as lord of Ghur, and it was one of his sons (Alauddin) who inflicted such terrible reprisals on Ghazni when he sacked and destroyed that city and its people. It was about this time (according to some authorities) that the kingdom of Bamian was founded by another member of the same family; but we find Bamian distinctly recognized as a separate kingdom by Idrisi a century or so earlier. From 1174 to 1214 Bamian was the seat of government of a branch of this family ruling all Tokharistan (Turkistan), during which period Seistan and Herat were certainly tributary to Ghur. Ghur then became so powerful, that it was said that prayers in the name of the Ghuri were read from uttermost India to Persia, and from the Oxus to Hormuz.

In 1214 Ghur was reduced first by Mahomedans from Khwarezm (Khiva), and shortly afterwards by Chenghis Khan and his Mongol hosts. About the middle of the thirteenth century, however, a recrudescence of power appeared under the Kurt (or Tajik) dynasty subject to the supreme government of the Mongols. Seistan, Kabul, and Tirah were then ruled from Herat as the capital of Ghur. Timur finally broke up Herat and Ghur in 1383, since which time its history has been as obscure as the geography of the region which surrounded it. Such in brief is the stormy tale of Ghur, and it leads to one or two interesting deductions. There was evidently constant and ready communication with Herat, Bamian, and Ghazni. The capital of Ghur must have been an important town, situated in a fertile and fairly populous district, which, although it was mountainous, yet enjoyed an excellent climate. It must have been a military centre too, with fortresses and places of defence. During its later history it is clear that Ghur was often governed from Herat, but in earlier mediæval days Ghur possessed a distinct capital and a separate entity amongst Afghan kingdoms, and was able to hold its own against even so powerful an adversary as Mahmud of Ghazni, whilst its communications were with Bamian on the north-east rather than with Kabul, which was then regarded as an "Indian" city. We can at any rate trace no record of a direct route between Ghur and Kabul.

In the twelfth century we read that the capital of Ghur was known as Firozkohi, which name (says Yule) was probably appropriated by the nomad Aimak tribe now called Firozkohi; but within the limits of what is now recognized as the habitat of the Firozkohi (i.e. the plateau which forms the basin of the Upper Murghab), it is impossible to find any place which would answer to what we know of the general condition of the surroundings and climate of the capital of Ghur, and which would justify a claim to be considered a position of commanding eminence. The altitude of the Upper Murghab branches is not more than 6000 to 7000 feet above sea-level, at which height the climate certainly admits of agriculture, but no place that has been visited, nor indeed any position in the valleys of the Upper Murghab affluents, corresponds in any way to what we are told of this capital.

If we look for the best modern lines of communication through Central Afghanistan we shall certainly find that they correspond with mediæval routes, fitting themselves to the conformation of the country. Central Afghanistan is open to invasion from the north, west, and south, but not directly from the east. The invasion of Ghur from Ghazni, for instance, must have been directed by Kalat-i-Gilzai, Kariut, and Musa Kila (in Zamindawar), to Yaman, which lies a little to the east of Ghur (or Taiwara). So far as we know there are no passes leading due west from Ghazni to the heart of the Taimani country.

From the south the Helmund and its affluents offer several openings into the heart of the Hazara highlands to the east of Taimani land, amidst the great rocky peaks of which the positions were fixed from stations on the Band-i-Baian. But there is no certain information about the inhabited centres of Hazara population; and from what we know of that desolate region of winter snow and wind, there never could have been anything to tempt an invader, nor would any sound commercial traveller have dreamt of passing that way from Seistan to Bamian and Kabul. The idea that Alexander ever took an army up the Helmund valley, and over the Bamian passes, must be regarded as most improbable in spite of the description of Quintus Curtius, who undoubtedly describes a route which presented more difficulties than are quite appropriate to the regular Kandahar to Kabul road. On the other hand, from Seistan by the Farah Rud there is a route which is open to wheeled traffic all the way to Daolatyar on the upper Hari Rud. Daolatyar may be regarded as the focus of several routes trending north-eastward from Seistan, with the ultimate objective of Bamian and the populous valleys of Ghur.

One of the chief affluents of the Farah Rud is now known as the Ghur, and we need look no farther than this valley for the central interest of the Ghur kingdom, although the exact position of the capital may still be open to discussion. Between the Tagao Ghur and the Farah Rud are the Park Mountains, which are almost Himalayan in general characteristics and beauty, with delightful valleys and open spaces, terraced fields, well-built two-storied wooden houses, pretty villages, orchards with an abundance of walnuts and vines trailing over the trees; the Ghur valley itself being broad and open with a clear river of sweet water in its midst. This is near its junction with the Farah Rud. Above this, for a space, the valley narrows to a gorge and there is no passing along it, whilst above the gorge again it becomes wide, cultivated, and well populated, and this is where the Taimani headquarters of Taiwara are found. Taiwara is locally known as Ghur, and may be absolutely on the site of the ancient capital, for there are ruins enough to support the theory. Beyond an intervening band of hills to the south are two valleys full of cultivation and trees, wherein are two important places, Nili and Zarni, which likewise boast of extensive ruins, whilst at Jam Kala, hard by, there is perched on a high spur above the road with only one approach, a remarkable stone-built fort. Yaman, to the east of Taiwara, in the Helmund drainage, is a permanent Taimani village. Here also are very ancient ruins, and the people say that they date from the time of Moses. At that time they say that cups were buried with the dead, one at the head and one at the foot of the corpse. Our native surveyor Imám Sharif saw one of these cups with an inscription on it, but was unable to secure the relic.

Nili and Zarni are in direct connection with Farah, with no inconvenient break in the comparatively easy line of communication; and they all (including Taiwara) are in direct communication with Herat, by a good khafila route (i.e. good for camels). But the routes differ widely, that from Herat to Taiwara by Farsi being more direct, whilst the route from Herat to Zarni by Parjuman (which is well kept up between these two places) passes well to the south. All these places, again, are connected with the Hari Rud valley at Khwaja Chist (the Ghur frontier) by a good passable high-road, which first crosses the hills between Zarni and Taiwara, then passes under the shadow of a remarkable mountain called Chalapdalan, or Chahil Abdal (12,700 feet high—about which many mysterious traditions still hover), over the Burma Pass into the Farah Rud drainage, thence over another pass into the valleys of the Tagao Ishlan, and finally over the Band-i-Baian into the Hari Rud valley at Khwaja Chist.

This is the route described by Idrisi as connecting Ghur with Herat, as we shall see. The Ghur district is linked up with Daolatyar and Bamian by the Farah Rud line of approach, or by a route, described as good, which runs east into the Hazara highlands, and then follows the Helmund. The latter is very high. There is therefore absolutely no difficulty in traversing these Taimani mountain regions in almost any direction, and the facility for movement, combined with the beauty and fertility of the country, all point unmistakably to Taiwara and its neighbourhood as the seat of the Ghuri dynasty of the Afghan kings.

The picturesque characteristics of Ghur extend southward to Zamindawar on its southern frontier, the valleys of the Helmund, the Arghandab, the Tarnak, and Arghastan—this is a land of open, rolling watersheds, treeless, but covered with grass and flowers in spring, and crowned with rocky peaks and ridges of rugged grandeur alternating with the rich beauty of pastoral fields. The summer of their existence is in curious contrast to the stern winter of the storm-swept highlands above them, or the dreary expanse of drab sand-dusted desert below. The route upstream to the backbone of the mountains, and so over the divide to the kingdom of Bamian, was once a well-trodden route.

Since so many routes converge on Daolatyar at the head of the Hari Rud valley, one would naturally look for Daolatyar to figure in mediæval geography as an important centre. It is not easy, however, to identify any of the places mentioned by Idrisi as representing this particular focus of highland routes. Between Ghur and Herat, or between Ghur and Ghazni, the difficulty lies in the number and extent of populous towns, any one of which may represent an ancient site, to say nothing of ruins innumerable. Between Taiwara and Herat we get no information from Idrisi till we reach Khwaja Chist on the frontier. He merely mentions the existence of a khafila road, and then he counts seven days' journey between Khwaja Chist and Herat, reckoning the first as "short."

The names of the halting-places between Khwaja Chist and Herat are Housab, Auca, Marabad, Astarabad, Bajitan (or Najitan), and Nachan. Auca I have no hesitation in identifying with Obeh. There is a large village at Marwa which might possibly represent Marabad, and Naisan would correspond in distance with Nachan, but this is mere guesswork; to identify the others is impossible, without further examination than was undertaken when surveying the ground.

The story of the commerce of Central Asia, which centred itself in Herat in the days of Arab supremacy, has a strong claim on the student of Eastern geography, for it is only through the itineraries of these wandering Semetic merchants and travellers that we can arrive at any estimation of the peculiar phase of civilization which existed in Asia in the mediæval centuries of our era; a period at which there is good reason to suppose that civilization was as much advanced in the East as in the West. It is not the professional explorers, nor yet the missionaries (great as are their services to geography), who have opened up to us a knowledge of the world's highways and byways sufficient to lead to general map illustration of its ancient continents, so much as the everlasting pushing out of trade investigations in order to obtain the mastery of the road to wealth.

India and its glittering fame has much to answer for, but India (that is to say, the India we know, the peninsula of India) was so much more get-at-able by sea than by land even in the early days of navigation, that we do not learn so much about the passes through the mountains into India as the way of the ships at sea, and the coast ports which they visited. According to certain Arab writers large companies of Arabs settled in the borderland and coasts of India from the very earliest days. Indeed, there are evidences of their existence in Makran long before the days of Alexander; but there is very little evidence of any overland approach to India across the Indus. Hindustan, to the mediæval Arab, commenced at the Hindu Kush, and Kabul and Ghazni were "Indian" frontier towns; and the invasions and conquests of India dating back to Assyrian times include no more than the Indus basin, and were not concerned with anything farther south. The Indus, with its flanking line of waterless desert, was ever a most effectual geographical barrier.

The Arabs entered India and occupied the Indus valley through Makran, and throughout their writings we find, strangely, little reference to any of the Indian frontier passes which we now know so well. But in the north and north-west of Afghanistan, in the Seistan and the Oxus regions, they were thoroughly at home both as traders and travellers; and with the assistance of their records we can make out a very fair idea of the general network of traffic which covered High Asia. The destroying hordes of the subsequent Mongol invasions, and the everlasting raids of Turkmans and Persians on the border, have clean wiped out the greater number of the towns and cities mentioned by them, and the map is now full of comparatively modern Turkish and Persian names which give no indication whatever of ancient occupation. There are, nevertheless, some points of unmistakable identity, and from these we can work round to conclusions which justify us in piecing together the old route-map of Northern Afghanistan to a certain extent. This is not unimportant even to modern geographers. The roads of the old khafila travellers may again be the roads of modern progress. We know, at any rate, that the Arabs of 1000 years ago were much the same as the Arabs of to-day in their manners and methods. Their routes were camel routes, not horse routes, and their day's journey was as far as a camel could go in a day, which was far in the wider and more waterless spaces of desert or uninhabited country, and very much shorter when convenient halting-places occurred. These Arab itineraries are bare enumeration of place-names and approximate distances. As for any description of the nature of the road or the scenery, or any indication of altitude (which they possibly had no means of judging), there is not a trace of it; and the difficulties of transliteration in place-names are so great as to leave identification generally a matter of mere guesswork.

One of the most interesting geographical centres from which to take off is Herat, and it may be instructive to note what is said about Herat itself and its connections with the Oxus and Seistan. Herat, says Idrisi, is "great and flourishing, it is defended inside by a citadel, and is surrounded outside by 'faubourgs.' It has many gates of wood clamped with iron, with the exception of the Babsari gate, which is entirely of iron. The Grand Mosque of the town is in the midst of the bazaars.... Herat is the central point between Khorasan, Seistan, and Fars." Ibn Haukel (tenth century) mentions a gate called the Darwaza Kushk, which is evidence that Kushk was of importance in those days, though no separate mention is made of that place; and he adds that the iron gate was the Balkh gate, and was in the midst of the city. The strategical value of the position was clearly recognized.

That grand edifice, the Mosalla, with its mosques and minars, which stood outside the walls of Herat and was the glory of the town in 1883 (when it was destroyed in the interests of military defence), had no previous existence in any other form than that which was given it when it was built in the twelfth century.

Both Ibn Haukel and Idrisi mention a mountain about six miles from Herat, from which stone was taken for paving (or mill-stones), where there was neither grass nor wood, but where was a place (in Ibn Haukel's time, but not mentioned by Idrisi) "inhabited, called Sakah, with a temple or Church of Christians." Idrisi says this mountain was "on the road to Balkh, in the direction of Asfaran." This would seem to indicate that Asfaran, "on the road to Balkh," must be Parana (or Parwana), an important position about a day's march north of Herat. Ibn Haukel says nothing about the road to Balkh, which can only be northward from Herat, but merely mentions that the mountain was on the desert or uncultivated side of Herat, where was a river which had to be crossed by a bridge. This could only be south of Herat. Asfaran is also stated to be on the road to Seistan and to have had four places dependent on it, one of which was Adraskand; and the route to Asfaran from Herat is further described as three days' journey (Idrisi). Ibn Haukel also describes Asfaran as possessing four dependent towns, and places it between Farah and Herat, or south of Herat. As Adraskand[6] is a well-known place between Herat and Farah, we must assume that this is either another Asfaran, or that Idrisi has made a mistake in copying Ibn Haukel. It might possibly be represented by Parah, twenty-five miles south-west of Herat, although the limited area of cultivable ground around renders this unlikely. Subzawar would indicate a far more promising position for an important trade centre such as Asfaran must have been, and would accord better with the three days' journey from Herat of Idrisi, or the itinerary from Farah given by Ibn Haukel, while the extensive ruins around testify to its antiquity. Asfaran was almost certainly Subzawar.

Considering the interest which may once again surround the question of communications from Herat to India, it may be useful to point out that the route connecting Farah with Herat 1000 years ago remains apparently unchanged. The bridge called the Pul-i-Malun, over the Hari Rud, must have been in existence then, and there was another bridge over the Farah River one day's march below Farah, on the highway between Herat and Seistan. To the west of Herat, on the ruin-strewn road to Sarakhs, we have one or two interesting geographical propositions.

Idrisi mentions a place possessing considerable local importance "before Herat had become what it is now," about 9 miles west of Herat, called Kharachanabad. This can easily be recognized in the modern Khardozan, a walled but very ancient town, which is about 8½ miles distant. Between it and the walls of the city there is now no place of importance, nor does it appear likely, for local reasons, that there ever could have been any. Another place, called Bousik, or Boushinj (Pousheng, according to Ibn Haukel), is said to be half the size of Sarakhs, built on the flat plain 6 miles distant from the mountains, surrounded with walls and a ditch, with brick houses, and inhabitants who were commercial, rich, and prosperous, and "who drink the water of the river that runs to Sarakhs." This indicates a site on the banks of the Hari Rud. The only modern place of importance which answers this description is the ancient town of Zindajan, which is about 6 miles from the mountains, and which (according to Ferrier) still bears the name of Foosheng. This name, however, was not recognized by the Afghan Boundary Commission. "To the west of Bousik are Kharkerde and Jerkere. One reckons two days' journey to this last town, which is well populated, smaller than Kuseri, but where there is plenty of water and cultivation. From Jerkere to Kharkerde is two days' journey." These two places are obviously on the road to Nishapur. There is an ancient "haoz," or tank, below the isolated hill of Sangiduktar, near the Persian frontier, which might well represent what is left of Jerkere, and Kharkerde lies beyond it, on the road to Rue Khaf (itself a very ancient site, probably representing Rudan), near Karat. Another place which has a very ancient and troubled history is Ghurian, about thirteen miles west of Zindajan. This is readily identified as the Koure of Idrisi, which is described as twelve miles from Bousik, on the left of the high-road westward, and about three miles from it.

This corresponds exactly with Ghurian, and proves that the high-road has retained its position through ages. Koure is described as an important town, but there is no mention of walls or defences. Another place, second only in importance to Bousik, is Kouseri. It is in fact said to be equal to Bousik, and to possess "running water and gardens." There can be little doubt that this is Kuhsan (or Kusan), one of the most important towns of the Herat valley.

This great high-road, intersecting the plain from the north-west gate of the city, is a pleasant enough road in the spring and summer months. For a space it runs singularly free from crowded villages and close cultivation, and the tread of a horse's hoof is amongst low-growing flowers of the plain, a dwarf yellow rose with maroon centre being the most prominent. Then, as one skirts the Kaibar River as it runs to a junction with the Hari Rud from the northern hills, cultivation thickens and villages increase.

The road next hugs the Hari Rud, and, passing the high-walled town of Zindajan to the south, runs, white and even and hard, with the scarlet and purple of poppies and thistles fringing it, between long gravel slopes of open dasht and the twin-peaked ridge of Doshak, to Rozanak and Kuhsan. Kuhsan is a little to the south of the Kaman-i-Bihist. It was here that the British Commission of the Russo-Afghan Boundary gathered in the late autumn of 1884, one half from England and the other half from India. The drab squares of the cultivated plain were bare then, in November, and the poplars on the banks of the river were scattering yellow leaves to the blasts of the bitter north-west winds of autumn which sweep through Khorasan and Seistan, making of life a daily burden. But there came a marvellous change in the spring-time, when the world was scarlet and green below and blue above; when the sand-grouse began to chatter through the clear sky; then Kaman-i-Bihist (the bow of Paradise) justified its name. The old Arab of the trading days who wandered northward to Sarakhs must have loved this place.

Stretching Sarakhs-ward are the hills, rocky and broken along the river edge, but gradually giving place eastward to easy rounded slopes, softened by rain and snow, and washed into smooth spurs with treacherous waterways between which become quagmires under the influence of a north-western "shamshir." The extraordinary effect of denudation which yearly results from the heavy rain-storms which are so frequent in spring and early summer in these hills must have absolutely changed their outlines during the centuries which have elapsed since the Semitic trader trod them. A summer storm-cloud charged with electricity may burst on their summits, and the whole surface of the slopes at once becomes soft and pulpy. Mud avalanches start on the steeper grades and carry down thousands of tons of slimy detritus in a crawling mass, and spread it out in fans at their feet. It is not safe to say that the modern passes of the Paropamisus north of Herat—the Ardewan and the Babar—were the passes of mediæval commerce, although the Ardewan is marked by certain wells and ruined caravanserais which show that it has long been used. It seems possible that these passes may have shifted their positions more than once. There was undoubtedly a well-trodden route from Bousik, which carried the traveller more directly to Sarakhs than would the Ardewan or even the Chashma Sabz Pass. This road followed the river more closely than any railway ever will. It turned the river gorge to the east, and probably passed through the hills by the Karez Ilias route, which runs almost due north to Sarakhs. The only certain indication which we can find in Idrisi is the statement that the "silver hill" (i.e. the hill of the silver mine) is on the road from Herat to Sarakhs. The Simkoh (silver hill) is still a well-known feature in the broken range of the Paropamisus, near that route. But it is difficult after centuries of disturbing forces, natural and artificial, to identify the sites of many of the towns and markets mentioned by Idrisi, who places Badghis to the west of Bousik, and gives the "silver hill" as one of its "dependencies." There were two considerable towns, Kua (or Kau) and Kawakir, said to have been near the silver hill, and there is mention of a place called Kilrin in this neighbourhood. Probably the ruins at Gulran represent the latter, but Kua and Kawakir are not identified. Gulran was one of the most fascinating camps of the Afghan Boundary Commission. On the open grass slopes stretching in gentle grades northward, bordered by the line of red Paropamisan cliffs to the south and west and by the open desert stretching to Merv on the north, it was, during one or two early months of the year, quite an ideal camping-ground.

It was here that the wild asses of the mountains made a raid on the humble four-footed followers of the Commission, and signified their extreme disgust at the free use which was made of their feeding-grounds; thus witnessing to the condition of primeval simplicity into which that once populous district had subsided after centuries of border raid and insecurity. The remains of an old karez, or underground irrigation channel, not far north of Gulran, testified to a former condition of cultivation and prosperity.

From Gulran (which is connected with the Herat plains directly by the pass called Chashma Sabz) roads stretch northwards and north-eastwards, without obstacle, to the open Turkistan plains, where ancient sites abound. Idrisi's indications, however, are but a very uncertain foundation for identifying most of them. The "dependencies" of Badghis are said to be Kua, Kughanabad, Bast, Jadwa, Kalawun, and Dehertan, the last place being built on a hill having neither vegetation nor gardens; but "lead is found there, and a small stream."

The great trade centres of Turkistan, north of the Paropamisus, in mediæval days were undoubtedly near Panjdeh, at the confluence of the Kushk and Murghab rivers, and at Merv-el-Rud, or Maruchak. Two or three obvious routes lead from the passes above Kaman-i-Bihist, or above Herat, to Panjdeh and Maruchak. One is indicated by the drainage of the Kushk River, and the other by that of the Kashan, which is more or less parallel to the Kushk to the east of it, with desolate Chol country in between. From Herat the most direct route to Panjdeh and Merv is by the Babar Pass, or by Korokh, the Zirmast Pass, and Naratu. Korokh (Karuj) is mentioned both by Ibn Haukel and Idrisi as being situated three marches from Herat, surrounded by entrenchments, and in the "gorge of mountains," with gardens and orchards and vines. The Korokh of to-day is between the mountains, but only some twenty-five miles from Herat. This modern Korokh has, however, many evidences of great antiquity, and it is on the high-road to an important group of passes leading past Naratu to Bala Murghab and Maruchak. The most remarkable feature about Korokh is a grove of pine trees closely resembling the "stone" pine of Italy, which mass themselves into a dark blotch on the landscape and mark Korokh in this treeless country most conspicuously. There are no other trees of the same sort to be found now in this part of Asia, but I was told that they once were abundant in the Herat valley, which renders it possible that the "arar" trees, mentioned by Ibn Haukel as a peculiar source of revenue to Bousik, may have been of this species. Naratu, again, is very ancient, and its position among the hills (for it is a hill-fortress) seems to identify it with Dahertan. Undoubtedly this was one of the most important of the old routes northward, and it is a route of which account should be taken to-day.

In the Kuskh River more than one ancient site was observed, Kila Maur being obviously one of the most important, whilst in the Kashan stream there were evidences of former occupation at Torashekh and at Robat-i-Kashan. Whilst there is a general vague resemblance between the names of certain old Arab towns and places yet to be found in the Herat valley and Badghis, it is only here and there that it has been possible to identify the precise position of a mediæval site. The dependencies of Badghis, enumerated by Idrisi, require the patient and careful researches of a Stein to place them accurately on the basis of such vague definitions as are given. We are merely told that Kanowar and Kalawun are situated at a distance of three miles one from the other, and that between them there is neither running water nor gardens. "The people drink from wells and from rain-water. They possess cultivated fields, sheep, and cattle." Such a description would apply excellently well to any two contiguous villages in the Chol country anywhere between the Kushk and the Kashan. Those rolling, wave-like hills, with their marvellous spread of grass and flowers in summer, and their dreary, wind-scoured bareness in winter, are excellent for sheep and cattle at certain seasons of the year; but water is only to be found at intervals, and there are much wider distances than three miles where not even wells are to be found.

Writing again of Herat, Idrisi says that, starting towards the east in the direction of Balkh, one encounters three towns in the district of Kenef: Tir, Kenef, and Lakshur; and that they are all about equally distant, it being one day's journey to Tir, one more to Kenef, and another to Lakshur (Lacschour). Tir is a rich town where the "prince of the country" resides, larger than Bousik, full of commerce and people, with brick-built houses, etc. Kenef is as large, but more visited by foreigners; and Lakshur is equal to either. They are all of them big towns of commercial importance, Lakshur being bounded on the west by the Merv-el-Rud province, of which the capital is Merv-el-Rud.

Assuming for the present that Maruchak, on the Murghab, represents Merv-el-Rud (Merv of the River), where are we to place these three important sites, so that the last shall be east of the Maruchak province and only three days' journey from Herat? The distance from Herat to Maruchak is not less than 150 miles, and it is called by Idrisi a six days' journey. Starting towards the east can only refer to the Balkh route already referred to, i.e. via Korokh and the Zirmast Pass. It cannot mean the Hari Rud valley, for that leads to Bamian rather than Balkh. By the Korokh route, however, it is possible to follow a more direct line to Balkh than any which would pass by Maruchak or Bamian. There is on this route, east of Naratu and south-east of Maruchak, a place called Langar which might possibly correspond to Lakshur, and it is not more than 70 to 80 miles from Herat. From Langar there is an easy pass leading over the Band-i-Turkistan more or less directly to Maimana and Balkh, and it seems probable that this was a recognized khafila route. Tir is an oft-repeated name in the Herat district. The river itself was called Tir west of Herat, and there is the bridge of Tir (Tir-pul) just above Kuhsan. The mountains, again, to the north-east are known as Tir Band-i-Turkistan, and the Tir mentioned as on the road to Balkh must certainly have been east of Herat. Of Kenef I can trace no evidence. It must have been close to Korokh.

That this route, through the Korokh valley and across the water-parting by the Zirmast Pass to Naratu, was the high road between Herat and Balkh I have very little doubt. It was the route selected for mail service during the winter when the Afghan Boundary Commission camp was at Bala Murghab, on the Murghab River, and it was seldom closed by snow, although the Zirmast heights rise to over 7000 feet, and the Tir Band-i-Turkistan (which represents the northern rebord or revetment of the uplands which contain the Murghab drainage) cannot be much less. The intense bitterness of a Northern Afghan winter is more or less spasmodic. It is only the dreaded shamshir (the "scimitar" of the north-west) which is dangerous, and travelling is possible at almost every season of the year. The condition of the mountain ways and passes immediately above Bala Murghab is not that of steep and difficult tracks across a rugged and rocky divide. In most cases it is possible to ride over them, or, indeed, off them, in almost any direction; but as these mountains extend eastward they alter the character of their crests. From Herat to Maruchak this is not, however, the direct road; the Kushk River, or the Kashan, offering a much easier line of approach.

All our investigations in 1884 tended to prove beyond dispute that Maruchak represents the famous old city of Merv-el-Rud, the "Merv of the River," to which every Arab geographer refers. Sir Henry Rawlinson sums up the position in the Royal Geographical Society's Proceedings (vol. viii.), when he points out that there were two Mervs known to the ancient geographer. One is the well-known Russian capital in trans-Caspia, the "Merv of the Oasis," a city which, in conjunction with Herat and Balkh, formed the tripolis of primitive Aryan civilization. It was to this place that Orodis, the Parthian king, transported the Roman soldiers whom he had taken prisoners in his victory over Crassus, and here they seemed to have formed a flourishing colony.

Merv was in early ages a Christian city, and Christian congregations, both Jacobite and Nestorian, flourished at Merv from about A.D. 200 till the conquest of Persia by the Mahomedans. Merv the greater has as stirring a history as any in Asia, but Merv-el-Rud, which was 140 miles south of the older Merv, is altogether of later date. This city is said to have been built by architects from Babylonia in the fifth century A.D., and was flourishing at the time of the Arab invasion. All this Oxus region (Tokharistan) was then held by a race of Skytho-Aryans (white Huns) called Tokhari or Kushan, and their capital, Talikhan, was not far from Maruchak. Now, Merv-el-Rud is the only great city named in history on the Upper Murghab, above Panjdeh, before the end of the fourteenth century A.D. After that date, in the time of Shah Rokh (Timur's son), the name Merv-el-Rud disappears, and Maruchak takes its place in all geographical works, the inference being that, Merv-el-Rud being destroyed in Timur's wars, Maruchak was built in its immediate neighbourhood. This surmise of Rawlinson's is confirmed by the appearance of Maruchak, which is but an insignificant collection of inferior buildings surrounded by a mud wall, with a labyrinth of deep canal cuttings in front of it and a rough irregular stretch of untilled country around. Merv-el-Rud must have been a much greater place.

There are, however, abundant evidences of grass-covered ruins, both near Maruchak and at the junction of the Chaharshamba River with the Murghab some 10 miles above Maruchak. Sir Henry Rawlinson points out the strategic value of this point, as the Chaharshamba route leads nearly straight into the Oxus plains and to Balkh. At the point of the junction of the two rivers the valley of the Murghab hardly affords room enough for a town of such importance as we are led to believe Merv-el-Rud to have been, even after making all due allowance for Oriental exaggeration. It is only about Maruchak that the valley widens out sufficiently to admit of a large town. It seems probable, therefore, that the site of Maruchak must be near the site of Merv-el-Rud, although it does not actually command the entrance to the Chaharshamba valley and the road to Afghan Turkistan.

On this road, some 30 miles from the junction of the rivers, there is to be seen on the slopes which flank the southern hills, the jagged tooth-edged remains of a very old town (long deserted) which goes by the name of Kila Wali. It is here, or close by, that the Tochari planted their capital Talikan, at one time the seat of government of a vast area of the Oxus basin. There is, however, another Talikan[7] in Badakshan to the east of Balkh, and there are symptoms that some confusion existed between the two in the minds of our mediæval geographers. Ibn Haukel writes of Talikan as possessing more wholesome air than Merv-el-Rud, and he refers to the river running between the two. This is evidently in reference to the capital of Tocharistan at Kila Wali. Again when he writes of Talikan as the largest city in Tocharistan, "situated on a plain, near mountains," he is correct enough as applied to Kila Wali, but this has nothing to do with Andarab and Badakshan with which we find it directly associated in the context.

On the other hand the Talikan in Badakshan was one of a group of important cities whose connection with India lay through Andarab and the northern passes of the Hindu Kush. Between Maruchak and Panjdeh, along the banks of the Murghab, are ruins innumerable, the sites of other towns which it is impossible to identify with precision. There can be little doubt, however, that the remains of the bridge which once spanned the river at a point between Maruchak and Panjdeh marked the site of Dizek (or Derak, according to Idrisi), which we know to have been built on both sides of the river, and that Khuzan existed near where Aktapa now is (i.e. near Panjdeh). The name Dizek is still to be recognized, but it is applied to a curious sequence of ancient Buddhist caves which have been carved out of the cliffs at Panjdeh, and not to any site on the river banks.

The confusion which occasionally exists between places bearing the same name in mediæval geographical annals is very obvious in Idrisi's description of Merv. The greater Merv (the Russian provincial capital) is clearly mixed up in his mind with the lesser Merv when, in describing the latter, he says that Merv-el-Rud is situated in a plain at a great distance from mountains, and that its territory is fertile but sandy; three grand mosques and a citadel adorn an eminence and water is brought to it by innumerable canals, all of which is applicable to Merv but not to Merv-el-Rud. He then continues with a description of the greater Merv, which is quite apropos to that locality, and makes it clear incidentally that Khiva (not Merv) represents the ancient Khwarezm. Again, he enumerates towns and places of Mahomedan origin which are "dependent" on "Merv." Amongst them we find Mesiha, a pretty, well-cultivated place one day's journey to the west of Merv; Jirena (Behvana), a market-town 9 miles from Merv, and 3 from Dorak (? Dizek), a place situated on the banks of the river; then Dendalkan, an important town two days from Merv on the road to Sarakhs; Sarmakan, a large town to the left of Dorak and 3 miles farther, Dorak being situated on the banks of the river at 12 miles from Merv in the direction of Sarakhs; Kasr Akhif (or Ahnef), a little town at one day's distance from Merv on the road to Balkh; Derah, a small town 12 miles from Kasr Ahnef where grapes were abundant. Here, says Idrisi, the river divides the town in two parts which are connected by a bridge. It is quite impossible to straighten out this geographical enumeration, unless we assume that it refers to Merv-el-Rud and not to Merv. Then Mesiha becomes a possibility, and might be looked for among the ruined sites on the Kushk River—possibly at Kila Maur. Dorak, at 12 miles from Merv in the direction of Sarakhs, and Dendalkan at two days' journey in the same direction, would still be on the river banks. Kasr Ahnef we know to have been built after the Arab invasion in the valley of the Murghab, about 12 miles from Khuzan (identified by Rawlinson with Ak Tepe) and 15 from Merv-el-Rud, and must have been situated near the Band-i-Nadir, where the desert road to Balkh enters the hills. Ak Tepe must once have been a place of great importance, both strategically (as it commands the position of the two important highways southward to Herat, the Kushk and the Murghab valleys) and commercially. But apparently its importance did not survive to Arab times. Dendalkan was certainly near Ak Tepe.

In making our surveys of this historic district it was exceedingly difficult to associate the drab and dreary landscape of this Chol (loess) country and its intersecting rivers with such a scene of busy commercial life as the valleys must have presented in Arab times. The Kushk is at best a "dry" river, as its name betokens, an unsatisfactory driblet in a world of sandy desolation. Reeds and thickets hide its narrow ways, and it is only where its low banks recede on either hand as it emerges into the flat plains above Panjdeh that there is room for anything that could by courtesy be called a town. The Murghab River shows better promise.

Below Maruchak, where towns once crowded, it widens into green spaces, and the multiplicity and depth of the astonishing system of canals which distribute the waters of the river on its left bank leave no room to doubt the strength of the former population that constructed them. Where the pheasants breed now in myriads, in reedy swamps and scrubby thickets, there may lie hidden the foundations of many an old town with its caravanserais, its mosques, and its baths. The economic value of the Murghab River is still great in Northern Afghanistan. No one watching the sullen flood pouring past Bala Murghab in the winter time and looking up to the dark doors of the mountains from whence it seems to emerge, could have any idea of the wealth and fertility and the spread of its usefulness which is to be found on the far side of those doors. From its many cradles in the Firozkohi uplands to its many streamlets reaching out round Merv and turning the desert into a glorious field of fertility, the Murghab does its duty bravely in the world of rivers, and well deserves all that has ever been written in its praise by past generations of geographers.

Amongst the many high-roads of Northern Afghanistan which are mentioned by the Arab writers, none is more frequently referred to than the road from Herat to Balkh, i.e. to Afghan Turkistan. Intervening between Herat and Afghan Turkistan there is immediately north the easy round-backed range called by various names which have been lumped under the term Paropamisus, down the northern slopes of which the Kushk and Kashan made a fairly straight way through the sea of rounded slopes and smooth steep-sided hills which constitute the Chol. But this range is but an extension of the southern rampart of the Firozkohi upland, which forms the upper basin of the Murghab and overlooks the narrow valley of the Hari Rud.

The northern rampart or buttress of that upland is the Tir Band-i-Turkistan, the western flank of which is turned by the Murghab River as it makes its way northward. So that there are several ways by which Afghan Turkistan may be reached from Herat. Setting aside the Hari Rud route to Bamian or Kabul, which would be a difficult and lengthy detour for the purpose of reaching Balkh, there is the route we have already mentioned via Korokh, Naratu, and Langar, and thence over the Band-i-Turkistan, or down the Murghab. But there is another and probably the most trodden way, via the Kashan to the Murghab valley at the junction of the Chaharshamba River, and up that river to the divide at its head, passing over into the Kaisar drainage, and so, either to Andkhui and the Oxus, or to Maimana and Balkh. This was the route made use of generally by the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission, and the existence of ancient tanks (called "Haoz") and of "robats" (or halting-places) at regular intervals in the Kashan valley, testifies to its use at no very ancient date.