26

INDIA

from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, that this
borderland is not to be separated from any general
consideration of Indian geography. National interest,
indeed, from day to day centres more and more on the
northern borders of India, and is drawn farther and
farther from the historical India of Clive and Hastings—
the India of England's beginnings in the race for
Empire; so that it may be well to commence with a
general geographical description of those border countries
across which lie the routes to India from the west and
north-west.
All the great highroads of the past, the overland
trade routes of the days ere Vasco da Gama rounded the
Cape, found their entrance to India within comparatively
narrow limits. From the Arabian sea-coast at Karachi
to the Kabul River is a direct distance, roughly, of 700
miles. This represents about one-fifth of the total length
of the northern frontiers of India, if we exclude Burma ;
and it is remarkable that England, who herself boasts
a frontier impregnable to the march of hostile armies,
should have acquired empire over a region so vast and,
at the same time, so difficult of land approach as India.
There is no historical record, no tradition even worthy
of attention, which points to the violation of the frontier
of India at any point beyond these 700 miles of rugged
and difficult hills extending between Karachi and the
Kabul River basin. Between these limits every tide of
foreign immigration, every horde of Mongols or Turks,
every Asiatic contribution to the mixed nationalities of
the Indian empire has found its way at one time or
another ; insomuch that there is hardly a living soul
in the plains of the peninsula (apart from the purely
aboriginal tribes, and the comparatively few whose
progenitors arrived by sea) who cannot claim descent
from one or other of the former great nationalities of
Asia who passed into India by these north-western gates.
Greeks, Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans and Persians, Skyths,
Turks, Tartars and Mongols all came that way; and
some of them have continued to pass long since Arabs,