32

INDIA

than seven or eight miles in a direct line from the
northern mouth of that tunnel which pierces the Khojak
range and carries the railway in a fairly direct course
about half-way between Quetta and Kandahar. At
New Chaman British India is practically in touch with
Afghanistan, It is true that Baluchistan intervenes for
more than 200 miles between New Chaman and the frontier
of Sind near Jacobabad,
but it is the Baluchistan
of British occupation, one
half of the distance lying
within the hill districts
ceded or rented to the
British Government by
Kalit, and the other in
that Kachi (or low land)
which forms such a marked
geographical feature at this
point of our frontier, dovetailing in between the hills of
Kalat and those belonging to the great independent tribes
of Marri and Bugti. From New Chaman the general run
of the Afghan-Baluch boundary is to the north-east. It
is an irregular and much-indented line defining many
local agricultural interests (for this part of Baluchistan is
not the desert of the west and south), but following wellmarked
 natural features where possible, until it touches
the Gomal River at Domandi.
The Gomal now represents the northern limit of
Baluchistan. Its eastern boundary from the mouth of
the river Hab (some twenty miles west of Karachi) to
the debouchment of the Gomal River into the plains of the
Derajat near Dera Ismail Khan, requires little definition.
For administrative purposes it follows the line of the old
pre-British frontiers of Sind, and may be said, roughly, to
divide the hills from the plains ; excepting for a certain
space where, leaving the Kalat Hills, it intersects the plains
of Kach Gandava, and passing a little north of Jacobabad
strikes the lowest slopes of the Bugti Mountains. For
nearly 600 miles from the sea to the Gomal the frontier

soo Miles
—— NS