3. The Cabul River.—1. The Kúner.—The eastern watershed of the Upper Kúner is common to the Gilghit river. The population is closely akin to the Dardoh and Dungher; its area being Upper and Lower Chitral, its language the Chitrali, its religion Shia Mahometanism.
South of the Chitral, on the middle Kúner, the creed changes, and we have the best known of the Paropamisans, the Kaffres of Kafferistan, reaching as far westwards and northwards as Kunduz and Badukshan—the Kaffres, or Infidels, so called by their Mahometan neighbours, because they still retain their primitive paganism.
Now when we approach the Cabúl river itself, the direction of which, from west to east, is nearly at right angles with the Kúner, the characteristics of the Dardoh, Chitrali, and Kaffre populations decrease—in other words, the area is irregular, and the populations themselves either partially isolated or intermixed. Thus, along the foot of the mountains north of the Cabúl river and west of the Kúner comes the Lughmani country; the language being by no means identical with the Kafir, and the Kafir paganism being reduced to an imperfect Mahometan—némchú Mussulman, or half Mussulman, being the term applied to the speakers of the Lughmani tongue of the valley of the Nijrow and the parts about it.
The Der, Tirhye, and Pashai vocabularies of Leach all represent Paropamisan forms of speech spoken by small and, more or less, fragmentary populations.
The valley of the Lundye has, almost certainly, been within a recent period, Paropamisan. Thus is it that Elphinstone writes of its chief occupants:—“The Swatís, who are also called Deggauns, appear to be of Indian origin. They formerly possessed a kingdom extending from the western branch of the Hydaspes to near Jellabahad. They were gradually confined to narrower limits by the Afghan tribes; and Swaut and Búnér, their last seats, were reduced by the Eusofzyis in the end of the fifteenth century. They are still very numerous in those countries.” By Indian I believe a population akin to that of Cashmeer is denoted—I do not say intended. Another extract carries us further still:—“The Shulmauni formerly inhabited Shulmaun, on the banks of the Korrum. They afterwards moved to Tíra, and in the end of the fifteenth century they were in Hustnugger, from which they were expelled by the Eusofzyes. The old Afghan writers reckon them Deggauns, but they appear to have used this word loosely. There are still a few Shulmauni in the Eusofzye country who have some remains of a peculiar language.”
Hence, the Paropamisans may safely be considered as a population of a receding frontier, the encroachment upon their area having been Afghan. With these the Asiatic populations end.
If we now look back upon the ground that has been gone over, we shall find that the evidence of the human family having originated in one particular spot, and having diffused itself from thence to the very extremities of the earth, is by no means absolute and conclusive. Still less is it certain that that particular spot has been ascertained. The present writer believes that it was somewhere in intratropical Asia, and that it was the single locality of a single pair—without, however, professing to have proved it. Even this centre is only hypothetical—near, indeed, to the point which he looks upon as the starting-place of the human migration, but by no means identical with it. The Basks and Albanians he does not pretend to have affiliated; but he does not, for this reason, absolutely isolate them. They have too many miscellaneous affinities to allow them to stand wholly alone.