SKETCH MAP OF HINDU KUSH PASSES
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By far the most important of these gaps are the uplands of Badakshan, stretching from the Oxus plains to the Hindu Kush. The plains of Balkh, as far east as Khulm and Tashkurghan, from whence the high-road leads to Haibak, Bamian, and the Hindu Kush passes, are fairly well mapped. The Oxus, to the north of Balkh, is well known, and the fords and passages of that river have been reckoned up with fair accuracy. From time immemorial every horde of Skythic origin, Nagas, Sakas, or Jatas, must have passed these fords from the hills and valleys of the Central Asian divide on their way to India. The Oxus fords have seen men in millions making south for the valleys of Badakshan and the Golden Gates of Central Asiatic ideal which lay yet farther south beyond the grim line of Hindu Kush. Balkh (the city) must have stood like a rock in the human tide which flowed from north to south. From the west, too, from Asia Minor and the Persian provinces, as well as from the Caspian steppes to the north-west, must have come many a weary band of tear-stained captives, transported across half a continent by their conquerors to colonize, build cities, and gradually amalgamate with the indigenous people, and so to disappear from history. From the west came Parthians, Medes, Assyrians, and Greeks, who did not altogether disappear. But no such human tide ever flowed into Badakshan from the east nor yet from the south. To the east are the barrier heights of the Pamirs. No crowd of fugitives or captives ever faced those bleak, inhospitable, wind-torn valleys that we know of. Nor can we find any trace of emigration from India. Yet routes were known across the Pamirs, and in due time, as we have seen, small parties of pilgrims from China made use of these routes, seeking for religious truth in Balkh when, as a Buddhist centre, Balkh was in direct connection with the Buddhist cities of Eastern Turkistan. And Buddhism itself, when it left India, went northward and flourished exceedingly in those same cities of the sandy plain, where the people talked and wrote a language of India for centuries after the birth of Christ. Balkh, however, never stayed the tide which overlapped it and, passing on, lost itself in the valleys under the Hindu Kush, or else, surmounting that range, streamed over into the Kabul basin. Whether the tide set in from north or west, the overflow was forced by purely geographical conditions into precisely the same channels, and in many cases it drifted into the hills and stayed there. What we should expect to find in Balkh, then (whenever Dr. Stein can get there), are records in brick, records in writing, and records in coin, of nearly every great Asiatic movement which has influenced the destinies of India from the days of Assyria to those of Mohamed. What a history to unfold!

Of the Badakshan uplands south and south-east of Balkh, we have but most unsatisfying geographical record. In the days preceding the first Afghan war when Burnes, Moorcroft, Lord, and Wood were in the field, we certainly acquired much useful information which is still all that we have for scientific reference. Moorcroft, as we have seen, made several hurried journeys between Balkh and Kunduz under most perilous conditions, when endeavouring to escape from the clutches of the border chief, Murad Beg. But Moorcroft's opportunities of scientific observation were small, and his means of ascertaining his geographical position were crude, and we gain little or nothing from his thrilling story of adventure, beyond a general description of a desolate region of swamp and upland which forms the main features of Northern Badakshan.

Lord and Wood, who followed Moorcroft at no great interval, and who were also in direct personal touch with Murad Beg under much the same political circumstances, have furnished much more useful information of the routes and passes between Haibak and Kunduz, and given us a very fair idea of the physical configuration of that desolate district. Lord's memoir on the Uzbek State of Kundooz (published at Simla in July 1838) is indeed the best, if not the only, authoritative document concerning the history and policy of Badakshan, giving us a fair idea of the conditions under which Murad Beg established and consolidated his position as the paramount chief of that country, and the guardian of the great commercial route between Kabul and Bokhara; but there is little geographical information in the memoir. The four fortified towns of the Kunduz state, Kunduz, Rustak, Talikhan, and Hazrat Imam, are described rather as depositories for plunder than as positions of any great importance, and the real strength of Murad Beg's military force lay in the quality of his hordes of irregular Uzbek horsemen and the extraordinary hardiness and endurance of the Kataghani horses. So highly esteemed is this particular breed that the late Amir of Afghanistan would permit of no export of horses from Kataghan, reserving them especially for the purpose of mounting his own cavalry.

We learn incidentally of the waste and desolation caused by the poisonous climate of the fens and marshes between Hazrat Imam and Kunduin, to which Murad Beg had transported 20,000 Badakshani families for purposes of colonization, and where Dr. Lord was told that barely 1000 individuals had survived; but Wood tells us much more than this in his charming book on the Oxus. From the point where he left the main road from Kabul to Bokhara (a little below Kuram north of the Saighan valley) till he reached Kunduz, he was passing over country and by-ways which have never been revisited by any European geographer. He tells us that "the plain between the streams that water Kunduz and Kuram has a wavy surface, and though unsuited to agriculture has an excellent pasturage. The only village on the road is Hazrat Baba Kamur. On the eastern side the plain is supported by a ridge of hills sloping down from the mountains to the south. We crossed it by the pass of Archa (so called from the fir trees which cover its crest), from the top of which we had a noble view of the snowy mountains to the east, the outliers of Hindu Kush. Next day we forded the river of Kunduz, and continuing to journey along its right bank, through the swampy district of Baghlan and Aliabad, reached the capital of Murad Beg on Monday the 4th Dec. (1837)." The story of Wood's travels in Badakshan has already been told; the moon-lit march from Kunduz through the dense jungle grass and swamp, often knee-deep in water; the gradual rise to higher ground above; the floating vapour screen that hovered over the fens; Khanabad and its quaint array of colleges and students, and the Koh Umber mountain, isolated and conspicuous, dividing the plains of Kunduz and Talikhan—all these are features which will indicate the general character of that part of Badakshan but leave us no fixed and determined position. The Koh Umber in particular must be a remarkable topographical landmark, as it towers 2500 feet above the surrounding plain with a snow-covered summit. Wood says of it that it is central to the districts of Talikhan, Kunduz, and Hazrat Imam, and its pasturage is common to the flocks of all three plains. But it is an undetermined geographical feature, and still remains in its solitary grandeur, a position to be won by future explorers.

From Khanabad to Talikhan, Faizabad, and Jirm (which, it will be recollected, was once the capital of Badakshan—probably the "Badakshan" of Arab geography), we have the description of a mountainous country supporting the conjectural topography of our maps, which indicate that this route borders and occasionally crosses a series of gigantic spurs or offshoots of a central range (which Wood calls the Khoja) which must itself be a north-easterly arm of the Hindu Kush, taking off from the latter range somewhere near the Khawak Pass. Here, then, is one of the most important blanks in the map of our frontier. Inconceivably rugged and difficult of access, it seems probable that it is more accessible from Badakshan than from the south. We know from Wood's account of the extraordinary difficulty that beset his efforts to reach the lapis-lazuli mines above Jirm in the Kokcha River something of the general nature of these northern valleys and defiles of Kafiristan reaching down to lower Badakshan. It would, indeed, be a splendid geographical feat to fix the position and illustrate the topography of this roughest section of Asia.

Between the Khawak Pass of the Hindu Kush which leads to Andarab, and the Mandal, or Minjan, passes, some 70 miles to the east, we have never solved the problem of the Hindu Kush divide. What lies behind Wood's Khoja range, between it and the main divide? We have the valley called Anjuman, which is believed to lead as directly to Jirm from the Khawak Pass as Andarab does to Kunduz. It is an important feature in Hindu Kush topography, but we know nothing of it. We may, however, safely conjecture that the Minjan River, reached by Sir George Robertson in one of his gallant attempts to explore Kafiristan, is the upper Kokcha flowing past the lapis-lazuli mines to Jirm. But where does it rise? And where on the southern slopes of the Hindu Kush do the small affluents of the Alingar and Alishang have their beginning? These are the hidden secrets of Kafiristan. It is here that those turbulent people (who, by the way, seem to exhibit the same characteristics from whatever valley of Kafiristan they come, and to be much more homogeneous than is usually supposed) hide themselves in their upland villages, amidst their magnificent woods and forests, untroubled by either Afghan or European visitors. Here they live their primitive lives, enlivened with quaint ceremonies and a heathenism equally reminiscent of the mythology of Greece, the ritual of Zoroaster, and the beliefs of the Hindu. Who will unravel the secrets of this inhabited outland, which appears at present to be more impracticable to the explorer than either of the poles? Yule, in his preface to the last edition of Wood's Oxus, remarks that Colonel Walker, the late Surveyor-General of India (and one of the greatest of Asiatic geographers) repeatedly expressed his opinion that there is no well-defined range where the Hindu Kush is represented in our maps, and he adds that such an expression of opinion can only apply to that part of the Hindu Kush which lies east of the Khawak Pass. Sir Henry Yule refers to Wood's incidental notices of the mountains which he saw towering to the south of him, "rising to a vast height and bearing far below their summits the snow of ages," in refutation of such an opinion; and he further quotes the "havildar's" (native surveyor) report of the Nuksan and Dorah passes in confirmation of Wood.

Since Yule wrote, Woodthorpe's surveys of the Nuksan and Dorah passes during the Lockhart mission leave little doubt as to the nature of the Hindu Kush as far west as those passes, but it is precisely between those passes and the Khawak, along the backbone of Kafiristan, that we have yet to learn the actual facts of mountain conformation. And here possibly there may be something in Walker's suggestion. The mountains to which Wood looked up from Talikhan or Kishm, towering to the south of him and covered with perpetual snow, certainly formed no part of the main Hindu Kush divide. Between them and the Hindu Kush is either the deep valley of Anjuman, or more probably the upper drainage of the Minjan, which, rising not far east of Khawak, repeats the almost universal Himalayan feature of a long, lateral, ditch-like valley in continuation of the Andarab depression, marking the base of the connecting link in the primeval fold formed by the Hindu Kush east and west of it. We should expect to find the Kafiristan mountain conformation to be an integral part of the now recognised Himalayan system of parallel mountain folds, with deep lateral valleys fed by a transverse drainage. The long valley of the Alingar will prove to be another such parallel depression, and we shall find when the map is finished that the dominating structural feature of all this wild hinterland of mountains is the north-east to south-west trend of mountain and valley which marks the Kunar (or Chitral) valley on the one side and the Panjshir on the other. The reason why it is more probable that the Minjan River takes the direct drainage of the northern slopes of this Kafiristan backbone into a lateral trough than that the Anjuman spreads its head into a fan, is that Sir George Robertson found the Minjan, below the pass of Mandal, to be a far more considerable river than its assumed origin in the official maps would make it. He accordingly makes a deep indentation in the Hindu Kush divide (on the map which illustrates his captivating book, The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush), bringing it down southward nearly half a degree to an acute angle, so as to afford room for the Minjan to rise and follow a course in direct line with its northerly run (as the Kokcha) in Badakshan. This is a serious disturbance of the laws which govern the structure of Asiatic mountain systems, as now recognized, and it is indeed far more likely that the Minjan (Kokcha) follows those laws which have placed the Andarab and the Panjshir (or for that matter the Indus and the Brahmaputra) in their parallel mountain troughs, than that the primeval fold of the Hindu Kush has become disjointed and indented by some agency which it would be impossible to explain. Who is going to complete the map and solve the question?

We are still very far from possessing a satisfactory geographical knowledge of even the more accessible districts of Badakshan. We still depend on Wood for the best that we know of the route between Faizabad and Zebak; and of those Eastern mountains which border the Oxus as it bends northward to Kila Khum we know positively nothing at all.

But beyond all contention the hidden jewels to be acquired by scientific research in Badakshan are archæological and antiquarian rather than geographical. Now that Nineveh and Babylon have yielded up their secrets, there is no such field out of Egypt for the antiquarian and his spade as the plains of Balkh. But enough has been said of what may be hidden beneath the unsightly bazaars and crumbling ruins of modern Balkh. Whilst Badakshan literally teems with opportunities for investigation, certain features of ancient Baktria appear to be especially associated with certain sites; such, for instance, as the sites of Semenjan (Haibak), Baghlan, Andarab, and particularly the junction of the rivers at Kasan. That Andarab (Ariaspa) held the capital of the Greek colonies there can be as little doubt as that Haibak and its neighbourhood formed the great Buddhist centre between Balkh and Kabul. Again, who is going to make friends with the Amir of Afghanistan and try his luck? It must be a foreigner, for no Englishman would be permitted by his own government to pass that way at present.