Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich

“ 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 59 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. ”

“ Seistan is the land of half-buried ruins. No such extent of ruins exists anywhere else in the world. It seems probable, therefore, that, like the sites of many another ancient city of Seistan, Pulaki has been either partially or absolutely absorbed in the boundless sea of desert sand, which envelops and hides away each trace of the past as its waves move forward in irresistible sequence before the howling blasts of the north-west. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ A European with a most limited knowledge of Pushto tramping the road in company with a Pathan, living the simple life of the people, picking up information every yard of the way, keenly interested in his rough surroundings, taking count of the ragged groups of stone-built huts clinging to the hill-sides or massed around a central citadel in the open plain, with here and there a disintegrating monument crowning the hill-top with a cupola or dome, the like of which he had never seen before. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A narrow band of rugged hills shuts off this lovely plain on the east from the only valley route which 98 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. ”

“ In the genial month of May the khafila left Draband and took the world-old Gomul route through the frontier hills to the central uplands of Afghanistan. The heat must have been awful, and as Vigne lived the life of the Lohani merchants, and shared their primitive shelter from day to day, it is not surprising that we find him complaining gently of the climate. The Lohanis treated him with the utmost kindness and consideration from first to last; and the story of his travels is in pleasing contrast to the tale told by Masson about the same time, of his adventures on the Kandahar side. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ridges of all degrees of altitude, extension, and rockiness, running in long lines of parallel flexure on a system of curves which sweeps them round gradually from the run of Indus frontier hills to an east and west strike through Makran, and a final trend to the north-west, where they guard the Persian coasts of the Gulf. As a rule they throw off no spurs, standing stiff, jagged, naked, and uncompromising, like the parallel walls of some gigantic system of defences, and varying in height above the plain from 5000 feet to 50. ”

“ It is here that those turbulent people (who, by the way, seem to exhibit the same characteristics from whatever valley of Kafiristan they come, and to be much more homogeneous than is usually supposed) hide themselves in their upland villages, amidst their magnificent woods and forests, untroubled by either Afghan or European visitors. Here they live their primitive lives, enlivened with quaint ceremonies and a heathenism equally reminiscent of the mythology of Greece, the ritual of Zoroaster, and the beliefs of the Hindu. ”

“ 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 4 of the innumerable victims to the long fatigue of a burdensome and ill-fed existence—the ghastly debris of former caravans. ”

“ Then the howling, desiccating winds of the north-west have carried back sand-waves and silt, burying villages and filling the 203 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ One can trace a genial spirit of camaraderie pervading the wanderings of Chinese pilgrims, the tracks of mediæval Arab merchants, the ways of modern missionaries, or the ocean paths of sailors. Once on the move, with the sweet influences of primitive nature pervading earth and air around, we may find, even in these days, that the Afghan becomes quite a sociable companion, and that he is to be trusted so far as he gives his word. ”

“ That part of it which embraces the affluents of the Balkh Ab and the Kunduz is described as intensely wild and dreary, traversed by irregular folds and ridges which rise in more or less rounded slopes to great altitudes, hiding amongst them deep-seated valleys and gulches, wherein is to be found all that there is of cultivation and beauty. From above it presents the aspect of a huge drab-coloured, hill-encumbered desert where man's habitation is not, and Nature has sunk her brightest efforts out of sight. ”

“ The valley is narrow and close, and the ruins of Tiz, extending on both sides the village, are packed close together in enormous heaps of debris, so covered with broken pottery as 300 to suggest the idea that the inhabitants of old Tiz must have once devoted themselves entirely to the production of ceramic art ware. Every heavy shower of rain washes out fragments of new curiosities in glass and china. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But no such human tide ever flowed into Badakshan from the east nor yet from the south. To the east are the barrier heights of the Pamirs. No crowd of fugitives or captives ever faced those bleak, inhospitable, wind-torn valleys that we know of. Nor can we find any trace of emigration from India. Yet routes were known across the Pamirs, and in due time, as we have seen, small parties of pilgrims from China made use of these routes, seeking for religious truth in Balkh when, as a Buddhist centre, Balkh was in direct connection with the Buddhist cities of Eastern Turkistan. ”

“ For any serious menace to the line of India's north-western defence we must look farther west—much farther west—for enough has been said of the great swelling highlands of the Firozkohi plateau, and of the Hazara regions south of the Hari Rud sources, to indicate their impracticable nature as the scene of military movement. It is, after all, the highways of Herat and Seistan that form the only avenues for military approach to the Indian frontier that are not barred by difficulties of Nature's own providing, or commanded from the sea. ”

“ North-west of this road lies the great basin of the central Helmund. South-east is a broken land of plain, ribbed and streaked with sharp ridges of frontier formation, about which we ought to know a great deal more than we do. Up the frontier staircases and on to this plain run many important routes from India. The Kuram route strikes it at its northern extremity and leaves it to the southward. The Tochi valley route, and the great mercantile Gomal highway strike into the middle of it, and yet no one of our modern frontier explorers has ever reached it from one side or the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although the chief trade route of the Arabs to India was not through Persia, but by way of the sea in coasting vessels, it is probable that both Arabs and Persians before them made good use of the geographical opportunities offered for an approach to the Indus valley and Northern India, and that the central line of Persian approach through Makran had been a world-old route for 322 centuries. It is really a delightful route to follow, full of the interest of magnificent scenery and of varied human existence, and it is the telegraph route from Ispahan to Panjgur in Makran. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”