Ba

INDIA

its terrific spurs and buttresses, can rival the softer beauty
of those western slopes of the Waziri mountains. But
such scenery as the heights of Kaisargarh or the valley
of Birmul may present is unusual on the Indian frontier
south of Peshawur. The official who passes an uneasy
life amongst the Pathan tribes of the frontier has not
much to say about the beauties of Nature as a general
rule. Natural landscape beauty, indeed, may here be
measured to a certain extent by altitude. The low ranges
of sun-scorched, blackened ridge-and-furrow formation
which form the approaches to the higher altitudes of the
Afghan upland, and which are almost as regularly laid
out by the hand of Nature in some parts of the frontier as
are the parallels and approaches of the attack under the
superintendence of the engineer who is besieging a fortress
—these are by no means “things of beauty,” and it is this
class of formation and this form of barren desolation that
is most familiar to the frontier officer. It is true that the
strata of clays and silts which overlie the salt formations
found in certain sections of the lower hills of the frontier
are distinguished by shades and tints of colour that are
as varied as the coloured sands on the southern coast of
England. But shades of delicate purple and grey will not
make up for the absence of the living green of vegetation ;
and the fantastic outlines assumed by disintegrating masses
of conglomerate schist is frequently impressive only from
its weird and outrageous defiance of all the rules of
Ruskin in relation to lines of landscape beauty. But with
higher altitudes a cooler climate and snow-fed soil is found,
and as soon as vegetation grasps a root-hold there is the
beginning of fine scenery. The upper pine-covered slopes
of the Safed Koh are as picturesque as those of the Swiss
Alps ; they are capped and crowned by peaks whose windswept
 altitudes are frozen beyond the possibility of vegetation,
 and are usually covered with snow wherever snow
can lie. In Waziristan, hidden away in the high recesses
of its great mountains, are many valleys of great natural
beauty, where we find the spreading poplar and the ilex
in all the robust growth of an indigenous flora. Waziristan