36

INDIA

authority. Their position is analogous in most respects
to that of the Pathan tribes still farther north. Certain
of these tribes immediately south of the Gomal (including
 the Sheranis) have recently been transferred for purposes
 of administration to the newly-formed north-western
agency.
Baluchistan is now represented by a long, narrow
province running approximately parallel to the Indus for
about 750 miles from the Arabian Sea, with an average
width of 200 miles, excepting where a triangular horn of
desert reaches out from the Kalat highlands westwards to
Seistan. With the exception of this Muhammadani and
Kharan desert, of the delta of the Purali River of Las
Bela, and of the Kachhi, or desert, which stretches from
Jacobabad to the mouth of the Bolan pass, the whole
country is mountainous.
From the Gomal River to Jacobabad there stretches
one continuous chain of mountain peaks, which, although
now distinguished by many local names, may well be
known under their ancient designation of Sulimani.
They are, and they have ever been, through the ages of
an immense past, the original habitat of the Pakhtun
or Pashtu speaking mountaineers whom we now cail
Pathans. The Suliméani system is not a water parting ; it
is not a central divide that throws off the beginning of a
great system of drainage east and west. The slopes of the
Sulimani hills, both east and west, drain equally to the
Indus, and it is the drainage of the western slopes that,
turning suddenly and bursting through the main chain of
central limestone ridges, forms those terrific gorges and
rock-bound mountain gates which are our only means of
access to the traversable valleys of the western plateau.
The main Sulimani ridge, which is the dominating feature
of the Indus frontier south of the Gomal, lies back from
the foot of the hills some thirty miles—which thirty miles
of gradual descent from the plateau to the plains is packed
close with narrow, rugged, sun-scorched, treeless ridges,
composed chiefly of recent clays and conglomerates, which
preserve an approximate parallelism in their strike, likening