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INDIA

a want of green freshness about all Baluchistan hill scenery,
in spite of the luxuriant growth of oleander and other
shrubs near the running streams, and of many a stretch of
rice or wheat cultivation which surrounds the villages and
orchards of the agriculturalist. Stern, frowning buttresses
 of rock, and jagged-edged lines of hills, mostly
shut in the narrow metalled way. Here and there the
line passes hundreds of feet above the bed of a local
torrent, and twists itself into the sinuosities of a mass of
hard limestone. Sometimes suspended high in the air,
sometimes burrowing through tunnelled rock, the train
works its way upwards to the open plain of the Peshin
Valley, into new scenery and a new climate. No stronger
contrast can be pictured than the fiery, oven-baked heat of
the stations near the foot of hills in summer, where even
flies and lizards cease to live, and the intensely cold blasts
of the winter blizzard on the upland water-parting which
marks the change of grade, when the powdered snow
drives in wreaths through the chinks of closed doors and
windows, and the uncoupled engine is set to tackle the
snowdrift alone.
Nor is the least difficulty which presents itself to the
Quetta mail that which is occasionally supplied by the
flight of locusts in the early autumn. The power of the
‘ocust to bring a heavy train to a stand in an upward
grade is derived from the disposition of hundreds and
thousands of greasy bodies over the wheels and along the
metals, and it is sometimes irresistible.
We have already given some short account of the
great strategic station of Quetta, and of that farthest
advanced post, which lies beyond the great Khojak
tunnel called Chaman. Here then, for the present, 124
miles beyond the Quetta station, the Quetta-Kandahar
line ends. Who shall say for how long? Seventy
miles intervene between Chaman and Kandahar; 300
more will take any railway by easy stages to Herat;
60 or 70 miles farther (across the only considerable
watershed in the whole distance) link up Herat with what
will soon be the Russian Trans-Caspian rail head. Five