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LIST OF MAPS

OROGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFGHANISTAN & BALUCHISTAN

COMPILED BY SIR THOMAS H. HOLDICH, K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., C.B.

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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