When we halted that night Landon, the Sarhad-dar, Idu and myself, as usual, took counsel as to the next day's movements, and finally decided to send two of Landon's spies to Bampur. Arrived there they were to tell the Khan that they had run away from us to warn him, because my mighty army, now on the march, might possibly take Bampur in its stride. In addition they were to tell him that, whilst it was true that the General commanding had given out that he was only going to march along the borders of the Bampur district in order to reach Galugan, where he intended to crush Juma Khan, they fully believed this to be only a blind, and that Bampur was to be first destroyed. Khwash itself had recently been threatened, and had only escaped destruction by surrender. It was now left in charge of five hundred of the British General's best troops, with ample supplies for a month.
It was only later on that I learned the success of this mission. The two spies arrived on a certain night at about one a.m. and did their part so well that, by two a.m., the terrified Khan had mounted his camel, and set forth for Makran.
Makran is an arid region lying along the shores of the Persian Gulf, and stretching inland for a distance of about sixty miles. It is filled with bare, dry mountains, and hills with curiously serrated edges. From the more fertile parts large quantities of dates are grown and exported.
Arrived at the headquarters of the British political officer, Colonel Dew, the Khan flung himself on his mercy, and implored him (so I have been told) not to allow General Dyer to attack him, though I have never seen Colonel Dew since to obtain an authentic account of the interview.
But this was another potential enemy cleared from our path, at any rate for the moment, and this was all that mattered to us.
On, or about, the 15th of April we continued our march towards Galugan, and on the second day came in view of the Koh-i-Bazman, an extinct volcano. This is an imposing mountain of between ten and eleven thousand feet, covered with snow and rising, a sheer, solitary peak, out of the plain.
At one point on the march Idu asked me whether I would like to see a curious hole in the ground lying only a little way off our line of route.
We turned aside for a few hundred yards, and, on a plain as flat as a billiard-table, with a surface coated with hardened clay—obviously, at one time, the bed of a lake—we came upon it. The perfectly level, smooth lips of the hole offered no suggestion that it had been excavated by human agency. On the contrary, it gave the appearance of having been punched in the ground by some tremendous force. The hole was about one hundred and fifty feet long, one hundred and twenty feet wide, and about fifty feet deep, with absolutely perpendicular sides.
Idu asked whether I could suggest any explanation of this formation, and, after examination, I admitted I had none to offer, asking him in turn whether any tradition was attached to it.