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