From the Indus to the Tigris

by H. W. Bellew

Formerly this district contained twelve flourishing villages, and in the winter months was crowded with the camps of nomad Afghans, but since the Persian occupation of Sistan, and the hostilities waged against the invaders during the past six or seven years, the country has suffered great loss, and is, in fact, almost depopulated. Seven of its villages have been abandoned, and their inhabitants, to the number of four thousand families, been forced to emigrate to Sistan as Persian subjects, in order to avoid the raids made from that quarter, whilst the Afghan nomads have entirely deserted the country, owing to the losses suffered by the forays upon their cattle from the same direction.

Júwen is a strong little fortress, built on the wide talus formed by the alluvium on the left bank of the river. Its walls are solid and substantial, and are surrounded by a deep ditch. These two forts and Calá Koh axe the chief strongholds of the Hokát district, which in former times was evidently very populous and highly cultivated, as is testified by the ruins of towns and castles that meet the eye in every direction. They are of far superior construction to the wretched mud hovels of the villages now existing in the country, and, in their state of demolition and desolation, are reproachful memorials of the invasions and revolutions that have, during successive centuries, reduced a fertile and populous country to a thinly-peopled waste. The ruins in their character resemble those of Pesháwarán and Záhidán, and are evidently of Arab origin; but amidst them here and there are found less artistic and every way inferior structures, plainly of more recent date.

The ancient road between Kandahar and Herat passed through Sistan and Hokát to Farráh and Sabzwár or Ispzár, and was the route always followed by invading armies, on account of the abundant supplies it furnished, as well as from the necessity of securing the subjection of its people before the direct route by Girishk could be safely adopted. The incursion of Tymúr completed the destruction commenced by the irruption of Changhiz, and the subsequent invasions of Bábar and Nadír again destroyed the partial restorations that time had effected.

The former, in 1522, captured and dismantled the important fortress of Hok or Ók, from which the district takes its name; Hokát being the Arabic plural of hok, and applying to the district of which it was the capital, just as Gháynát applies to the territory of which Gháyn is the capital. The latter, more than two centuries later, when marching against Kandahar, destroyed all the principal forts on his route from Farráh through Sistan and Garmsel up to Búst; and from this period, about 1737, up to the present time, this country has remained in much the same state of ruin that it was left by Nadír. Hokát possesses all the requisites for a very prosperous little chiefship, so far as the natural conditions of the country are concerned, for its soil is fertile, and water abundantly at command; but it pines under the curse of anarchy, and groans under the load of its oppressions. The district is about sixty miles from east to west, and about fifty from north to south. Its boundaries are Harút or Adraskand river on the west, the Calá Koh and Farráh hills on the north, the Khásh desert on the east, and the Naizár on the south.

From its position on the frontier between the Mughal and Persian empires, this district has suffered the full force of the revolutions and political vicissitudes marking the history of those rival sovereignties, and consequently has never thoroughly recovered from the havoc wrought by the Tátárs; and its present state of desolation is only the consequence of the long period of anarchy and misrule that have characterised the history of this region since the downfall of the Arab dominion. Of the capabilities of the soil, and the command of water, the existing memorials of former populous cities are sufficient evidence; and, under a strong government and enlightened rule, there appears no reason why it should not once more become the fertile and prosperous country it is known to have been.

18th March.—Lásh to Panjdih, six miles. This was a sorrowful day for us all. We had sent our baggage across the river during the forenoon, and were about to follow at midday, when a courier arrived from Kandahar viâ Farráh, bringing our post from Peshawar with dates up to the 16th February. The joy produced by the receipt of these eagerly-looked for budgets, containing as they did letters from those we hold near and dear, and news of the world we had left behind us, was on this occasion sadly shocked by the mournful intelligence of the assassination of the Viceroy of India on the 8th February, at the hands of a convict in the Andamans. The news of Lord Mayo’s death cast a gloom over our party for many days, and for some of us the calamity was invested with a peculiarly painful interest, from the fact of our having known the perpetrator of the tragedy for many years as a well-conducted and loyal servant of the British Government. He was an Afridi Pathan, and had during several years done good service as personal orderly to successive Commissioners of Peshawar, and, through the inflexible administration of our law, was condemned to transportation for life for the murder, within British territory, of a fellow clansman in satisfaction of a blood-feud; both being natives of independent territory.

His name was Sher ’Ali, and, like all Pathans with a grievance, he was deterred by the fear of neither God nor man in seizing an opportunity for revenge; and thus it happened that, by an extraordinary accident, the head of the Government fell a victim to his sense of injury, India plunged into mourning, and the country deprived of one of its most popular and able governors.

Leaving our camping-ground, we forded the river a little below the Lásh fort. It flowed in a clear quiet stream, about sixty yards wide, over a firm pebbly bottom; the water reaching half-way up the saddle-flaps. Beyond the river we passed through a wide pebbly gully round the western face of the fort, and gradually rose on to a strip of the desert, which here projects up to the river bed in a promontory half a mile wide. From this elevation we got a good view of the Júwen fort and the ruin-covered basin of the Farráh river; and descending from it, passed north-west over its alluvium, and camped in the midst of the ruins of a considerable town close to the little castle of Panjdih, on the right bank of the river.

In the cliffs of the desert bounding the alluvium on our left we passed a couple of caves said to have been originally inhabited by fire-worshippers. I dismounted to explore them, and found that they extended for a considerable distance under the cliff. They are very low roofed, and divided into numerous passages by thick pillars formed of the clay soil. The ceiling is very roughly cut out in the shape of a vault, and the hard clay is charred with soot. The floor is covered with human footprints, but farther in is marked by the pads of the hyænas or wolves. The caves could accommodate thirty or forty people according to the estimate of my native attendants.

From Panjdih we marched sixteen miles to Khúshkrodak, or “the dry rivulet,” and camped in its wide bed a little off the high road, and on the edge of a thready stream trickling down its centre, amidst an abundant growth of a tall coarse pasture grass called kerta.