AFGHANISTAN

81

is, indeed, a miniature frontier Switzerland. South of the
Gomal, and beyond the striking scenery of such mountain
masses as Kaisargarh, we find in the uplands, above the
line of the barren border ridges, softer spaces of rounded
outline, where the long sweeping spurs of subsidiary hills
are covered with forests of the wild olive tree, which
here attains to an enormous size, and forms as distinctive
a landscape feature between Fort Sandeman and the
western slopes of the Suliméanis as in Southern Italy.
Farther south again, in the hills that circle about the
head of the Peshin Valley, at still higher altitudes (8000
feet or thereabouts), are forests of juniper, Here the
ragged growth of twisted and knotted trees presents a
fresh characteristic of weird scenery such as is probably
not to be matched in all India. Ziarat, the hill station
of Quetta, which lies on the slopes of Kalifat (the highest
mountain of Baluchistan), is surrounded with juniper
forest.

On the grandeur of those approaches to the heights
of Baluchistan and Afghanistan which are carved out of
the hills by water-channels forming gigantic rifts (such
as the well-known Chappar rift on the Harnai line of
railway) there is no space to dilate. Familiarity with
them can only breed a growing wonder at the tenacity
of those primeval waterways which, through an immeasurable
 past, have ever retained their original course.
Passing on to the elevated plateau or uplands of
Afghanistan (averaging 6000 feet towards the north, and
falling to 4000 feet above sea-level as it approaches the
boundary of Baluchistan on the south-west—the “ hinterland”
 of the Indian frontier lying within that boundary),
we have to add a few general notes on its geographical
conformation, its ethnography, and its possibilities of
“conomic and strategic development.
Afghanistan is a political expression denoting the territory
 ruled over by the Amir of Kabul. It is not (necessarily)
 the land of the Afghan, for the Afghan extends
his occupation over districts which are beyond the
Amir’s control, Neither do the Afghans occupy Afghani-