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Figurt 36. Map of Afglbanistan sbowing the route followed by the Museum party. AFGHANISTAN

The reconnaissance described here has been followed in the summer of 1953 by the University Museum Expedition to Afghanistan under the direction of Rodney S. Young, Curator of the Mediterranean Section. He writes that Schuyler Cammann and Dorothy Cox are now beginning the excavation of a Buddhist monastery in the Kunduz area of northern Afghanistan. Once this excavation is under way, Dr. Young will begin test excavations in the ancient city of Balkh not far from the Amu Darya r iver on the Bactrian Plain. This research is in collaboration with the Kabul Mu- seum under the direction of Ahmed Ali Kohzad. Dr. Carleton Coon expects to arrive in Afghanistan in February or March, 1954, to make a search for palaeolithic sites somewhere in the region of the Hindu Kush.

The great Eurasian mountain axis, the Caucasus-Elburz-Hindu Kush-Himalaya line forms a barrier from behind whose snow-capped peaks Turks, Iraqi, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistani, and Indians face toward inner Asia. Only two regions north of the barrier remain open for archaeological research by western nations-the Gurgan plain in northern Iran and the Bactrian plain in northern Afghanistan. For me this frontier is one of the most exciting regions in the world, not be- cause of the current military strategy involved, but because it has had such a profound effect upon human history. No one knows when watch towers were first established in the passes, but the known history of southwest Asia is a record of attack from the northern Steppes. Cimmerians, Sarmatians, Scyths, Mongols, Turks, and a host of related peoples have broken through the mountain frontier like tidal waves across a reef. They have left the scars of pillage and destruction and the rubble of innumerable destroyed cities everywhere in the fertile valleys of the south. And yet, this mountain barrier is not only a battleground, it is a center for technological revolu- tion as well as invasion, and probably the birthplace of civilization. Certainly many of the basic inventions and discoveries such as irrigated agriculture, domestication of animals, manufacture of metal and related technological inventions were made here in the mountain foot hills and valleys, and the snow of these peaks supplied the water for the great river civilizations of antiquity on the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Indus. Caravan routes connecting China, India, Persia, Babylonia, and 41 the Mediterranean, which joined in the high valleys of Afghanistan, were the highways of trade before the age of European expansion. Afghanistan, lying astride the barrier at the center of the axis, is both the cross-roads and the gate-way of Central Asia (see map, Fig. 36). During April and May of 1952 my companion, Dr. Harold Amoss, Research Associate in Ethnology in the University Museum, and I, traveled from Turkey to the Khyber Pass in Pakistan along this mountain barrier searching for the most promising regions for future archaeologi- cal research.* The University Museum has been digging for more than sixty years in the Near and Middle East, most recently in Iraq, Turkey, Cyprus, and Iran, and it is now our intention to extend our research into Central Asia. With a jeep and ttrailer we found that it is ten hard days of travel from Teheran in Iran to Kabul in Afghanistan but it is worth it. This is the slow way but it is the way to discover for oneself the heart of Asia. Jeep travel on a graveled road which is overworked with heavy truck traffic is a kind of slow torture which many of us take for granted as a result of World War Il. On our way out of Teheran I was begin- ning to feel something of a martyr until on the morning of our second day we came upon a wild young Frenchman riding a motorcycle from Paris to Calcutta. My companion and I found him loading his machine before dawn in Shah-Rud, Iran. He had everything from a tent and bed roll to books on Middle East economy and Persian poets, extra parts for the motorcycle, drugs and collar buttons, even some French bread and cheese and a bottle of cognac. In fact everything but drinking water and gasoline. Some of his biggest bundles went into our jeep-trailer and from there on we were a motorcycle escorted cavalcade which completely puzzled all the soldiers at the military control points. We reached the Iran-Afghanistan frontier on the evening of the fourth day, after a break for refitting in Mashhad. This "city of fanatics" struck me as one of the pleasantest cities in Iran and I can understand why our Consul there, Mr. Gidney, preferred it to Teheran. In fact it was here that a conviction began to grow: the farther from westernized

* The travels and research described in the main body of this article were financed by a grant from the Axel Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthwpology in New York City. 42 Asiatic cities the more friendly the people and the more pleasant the life. In my case the frontier was much more than 1200 kilometers from Teheran- it was more ne~rly a century away. The frontier military post in Iran at Usafabad is a kind of "Beau Geste" mud-walled fort on the edge of the desert. But just to take off from such an outpost into the desert and to drift off into the past several centuries just as night reached us was a kind of excitement which is worth twenty-four hours of air travel and three days in a jeep. Usually there are bright stars, but when there is a high dust it can be as black as the inside of a mitten. Mercadie led the way along a track on his motorcycle and we followed the glow of his headlight. Thirty kilo- meters of no-man's land separates Usafabad from the Afghan outpost at Islam Kala. It was like traveling for hours in the blackness of a cave, no light, no stars, only the faint track in the desert picked out by our headlights. Then when it seemed that we must have missed the post at Islam Kala, a single tall figure in a long white nightgown materialized out of the sand, presented a long rifle, and said in perfectly intelligible English, "Passports, please." Not long after that we picked up a faint lamp light and then two large handsome buildings set in separate compounds. The three of us spoke no Persian or Pushtu. Our welcome was hearty if wordless and we were soon happily bedded down in one of Afghanistan's famed rest houses for foreigners with all the familiar western equipment plus the finest Afghan rugs. Strangely enough there were no soldiers about- just a few attendants, the customs people, and those attractive big buildings in the desert. We saw no vehicle of any kind during four hours of driving from the frontier to the first big Afghan city, Herat on the Hari River. It lies near a broad low pass through the western part of the mountain barrier. It is a lovely lonesome country-desert, grassy hills, and cheerful streams, much like our Southwest even to the occasional 'dobe house and the nomads who might be Navajo. Of course there are all those big camels and the black felt tents together with the sheep, goats and tough little bright-eyed children. But it is the absence of motor traffic, the big quiet country of herding nomads, and the pleasant tempo of camel caravans which make one realize he has really crossed into an- other world where time plays tricks and the centuries are telescoped. 43 Herat, at first, seemed to be a series of great factory chimneys rising out of a brilliantly green valley. Actually I should have known that these "smoke stacks" were the standing minarets of the Mosque in what was known as the Mussala of Herat. The domes and the rest of the vast structure are gone and only the minarets remain. As we drove along pleasant tredined streets the illusion was confirmed. Here is a medieval city such as Marco Polo visited. But it was not at all what I expected. It is clean, with cool streets, tidy shops, and well,dressed people, no beggars crowding about, and only quietly curious people with a look of pride and quiet selh ssurance w hich I had seen nowhere else in Asia. Traffic in the streets consists mostly of two,wheeled carts freshly painted in bright colors and drawn by fat horses in bright new harness. I thought of all the dreary hacks I'd ridden in from Rome to Singapore. But the market place is crowded with packed camels, burros, and horses, even an occasional bullock, and then, with some surprise, we saw a very dilapidated C hevrolet bus'truck- the Afghan mail just in from Kabul, five or six days travel to the East. There was a shabby look about the bus,truck and its passengers which was jarring' ly out of place in Herat. Herat is ancient Arya, traditionally the birthplace of the Aryan people. No one knows how old it is but there is an ancient wall about part of the city said to have been built by Alexander and the vast ruin of an ancient city lies just north of the Alexandrian City. It is in a natural pass which leads through the mountainous spine of Asia into the steppes of Turkestan. Although south of the great divide, it is yet accessible from Merv, Bokhara, and Samarkand. But in this it is an eddy in the whirling currents of political intrigue which have resulted from the struggle of western powers to control southern Asia. It has remained outside the spheres of both Russia and Britain. It is equally remote from Teheran and Kabul. Abdur Raof Fakri Suljogy, the poet,architect who completed a magnificent new mosque in Herat in 1951, and his cousin Shamsud,Din Matin, professor of English, were asked by the Governor's secretary to show us the city. Fortunately none of us was really interested in statistics. I remember the quiet tree,lined streets, the charming gardens with their masses of flowers and scented flowering trees, the brill iant new mosque; above all the ancient mosque and its "Tower of the Holy Men" overlooking the city and the ancient ruins. For one brief moment 44 we could live in the time of the Abbasids when Muslim civilization reached its culmination. Here was a peace and a kind of philosophic certainty that my generation has long since forgotten. You could feel it in the charming tea-chambers of the tower, each with its particular view over the gardens, the mountains or the city, in the flower bordered walks of the mosque, in the eyes of white gowned, blue turbaned, and white bearded Holy Men, in the thoughtful friendliness of the men whose guests we were. Tea is a ritual of good taste and good conversation. Also it is very good Chinese tea served in fine china bowls. Through Shamsud-Din Matin as interpreter we could speak, and I am afraid this was my un- doing. The conversation was of Persian-Afghan poets and philosophers. I could not even remember the names of the poets for whom all those streets are named in Iran. Mercadie did somewhat better since he had that book on his motorcycle, but in desperation I dragged in Omar Khayyam. The faces of our hosts turned blank or pained. Conversation imperceptibly moved to English writers who had been translated by the Hera ti. William James was good for a brief spell but we could not match the knowledge of our hosts. Then, I presume also in desperation, one of our hosts introduced another English writer recently translated, Dale Carnegie and his How to Win Friends and lnjlucncc People-our turn to look blank or pained. I think we all felt the discourtesy of ignorance and the hopeless divide of time and space. But all of us could appreciate evening over Herat with the blue smoke of cooking fires rising over the city and the golden light of lamps being lighted. Almost everyone in America, I suppose, has forgotten what a city looks like when there is no electric light, no gas or electricity for cooking, and no coal smoke. It had a quality which I had never seen and never imagined. How can you describe a city in lamplight with the clop, clop of horse-drawn car- riages, the snuffing and moaning of ghostly camels, and the stillness which precedes the introduction of the internal combustion engine? Herat is, of course, on the point of disappearing. In Kabul I met an eager young man from Milwaukee who was on his way to Herat to in- stall X-Ray equipment in a new hospital. It means power plants, motor transport, machines, industry, and 20th-century skepticism. Only if you had been in Herat would you say that an X-Ray was a bad 45 thing. It is a curious fact, to us, that Herat, the most isolated medieval and unwesternized city I have ever seen, is cleaner, healthier, more peaceful, more stable, and more friendly than any other Asiatic city I know. Also, you can buy 120 eggs for one dollar, breakfast for a penny, and no one is hungry. The desert of southern Afghanistan is much like a landscape by Dali. It is one of those dreams in which the walls of your bed chamber retreat and disappear to leave you floating in endless space. Space is dramatized by the jagged red mountains which thrust up through the desert without rhyme or reason. Mercadie in his crash helmet waiting for us by his motorcycle looked like a space ship traveler lost in the craters of the moon. Once along our road we found the Afghan mail truck with its engine spread all over the sand and its passengers panting in the small shade under the chassis. The sweating, laughing driver was working a bolt wrench with his toes. We found rest houses at Sabzawar, Farah, Dilaram, and Girishk with the usual mutton, rice and tea, and, most necessary of all, thirteen gallon tins of Russian gaso~ line which had been arranged for us. In this dream world there is one sharp reality-the rivers. What joy just to sit in them! Fortunately all the bridges built 27 years ago have been washed out so we had plenty of excuse to splash about in the water; particularly in the Khash near Dilaram which was high and over the seats of the jeep (Fig. 37). The Afghan mail was stuck in the middle, but we managed, with the motorcycle aboard, and in tow by two very tall camels, to navigate the jeep and trailer around the truck.

Figam 37. Crossing tbe Kbash river, near Dilaram. Fig11rc 38. A tell which is still in- habited beside the road to Ghazni.

We could not speak a word to anyone at the crossing and yet camels arrived, gear was carried over, the jeep was water-proofed, and a reasonable payment negotiated all by sign language. In Afghanistan, obviously, friendliness does not depend upon verbal communication. Somewhere in this desert near Girishk on the Helmand River we knew we would find the Americans digging a very big irrigation ditch. Much farther below Girishk than we thought it should be, we found the familiar Morrison-Knudson enterprise announced by a big sign in the desert reading simply "at last." This is the advanced guard of Afghanistan's technological revolution by which the motorized forces of the western system are rapidly advancing from the Pakistan border toward the west reclaiming one of the world's most desolate deserts. The company's base is Kandahar, a few hours' drive east of Girishk. And the dust hanging over the base and settling on the shops and streets of this more familiar-looking partially westernized Asiatic city seemed to me to symbolize the philosophic confusion of the transition- the junk of construction, dust, dirt, overcrowded streets, and the new poverty of industrialization. It was another two days by jeep through Mukur, Ghazni, where ancient tells are frequently visible (Fig. 38), and thence through Arghandeh Pass into Kabul high in the mountains. We climbed from desert to steppe to mountain valley along with the spring migration of the nomads- thousands of them with their sheep, goats, camels, and horses in caravans moving upward to new grass. Each year for unknown thousands of years these people have moved their flocks southward from 47 Asia and northward from the deserts of southern Asia into the high valleys of the mountain barrier. On the Kandahar to Kabul road in April we began to pass them in small tribal groups but in May as we we traveled from Kabul southeast to the Khyber Pass, we met an almost continuous stream extending from Kabul to the eastern ap~ proaches of Lataband Pass. Herat had been a fleeting glimpse of the Islamic world in its greatest period. Now ranks of marching nomads gave me an eerie sense of living, even before the beginning of history, in an age which we know only from archaeology. The nomads were always there on the frontiers of civilization trading or fighting with the people of the ancient cities along the river valleys. They are the unchanging background of history in Asia and they remind the anthropologist of what went into the mak~ ing of men. Horsemen, packed camels, burros, cattle, sheep, goats, and men, women and children on foot, like an endless migration of arctic water fowl, stream up over the barren foot hills and through the narrow passes in a yearly movement which is as timeless as the seasons. The men are armed, as free men always have been, and the women watch the young, the lambs, kids, suckling camels, colts, and the infants. Those too young to walk, and this is the very young indeed, are strapped to the backs of camels, horses, or burros. We watched an old and steady camel which bore an infant, a lamb, and a baby camel lashed to the normal pack of tent and rugs. There are no stragglers. Men and flocks must move ahead of withering grass and disappearing water boles even though it is the season when all the females are big with young or are nursing the newly born. The flocks are the life of the people and they all, men and animals alike, have the grace, the health, and the ruggedness of wild things. They are tough, handsome and proud. Once, in the Ghorband Gorge north of Kabul, we met one of the headmen of the nomads with his bodyguard of four young horsemen. He was a very handsome elder with a pure white beard, an elaborate turban, a beautifully clean and rich~looking gown of bright blue, a long, carved rifle, a saber, and £ne boots. He and his young horsemen rode those famous horses of the Bactrian Plain which became a legend even in ancient Greece. I should like to remember Afghanistan as symbolized by that group in a mountain pass connecting south and central Asia, a group which in turn symbolized the independent nomads of the whole mountainous frontier from the Caucasus to India. 48 Fig,m 39. An Af- ghan herder with his flocks high in the Hindu Kush.

l'lrnlogro,ph by Sclo1yler Cammau,

Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack once made an epic film called "Grass" while traveling with the spring migration of the Baktyari in Iran. These Baktyari, like the Pathans of Afghanistan, are Aryan- speaking people whose history and origin are lost in antiquity. We know that they fought the disciplined Macedonian troops of Alexander, the tough cavalry of the Turks, the best British troops on the northwest frontier of India, and they are still not suppressed or domesticated. Cooper and Schoedsack found their ultimate reality among nomads in the passes to the Iranian Plateau, an escape, as I recall, from the twentieth century after World War I. The same reality exists today in the passes of the Hindu Kush (Fig. 39). Of course it is the history of the country which is our concern, not its current technological revolution, but even an archaeologist cannot escape an immediate interest in a cultural process which is so obvious in a capital city like Kabul. The Afghans have accepted the inevitable pressure for change and are rapidly moving into the age of machines with all its trials and conflicts. For one who admires their indepen- dence and courage there is bound to be regret that this is inevitable and also a hope that the transition will be less painful than it has been in other parts of Asia. In Kabul my interests were with the Museum, the French Archae- ological Delegation, and the Royal Afghan Ministry of Education. 49 Two great civilizations are represented in the art collections of the Kabul Museum- the Buddhist and the Islamic. Thirty years of French excavations at Hadda, Begram, Bamian, and in other ancient ruins in Afghanistan, in addition to the careful collections made by Ahmed Ali Kohzad, Director of the Kabul Museum, make it possible to compre- hend the past two thousand years of Afghan history. The record of Buddhist art, architecture, and intellectual life during its expansion from India through the mountain passes into central Asia and China, is comparable to, and contemporary with, that of expanding Christi- anity in the western world. But to a westerner one of the most fasci- nating and yet unexplained chapters in this history is the origin of Buddhist art, which seems to be a blend of Greek and ancient Afghan. There was a Graeco-Bactrian kingdom established along the mountain frontier after the conquest of Alexander in 330 B. C. which we know only from sketchy history and from large collections of coins found in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its capital in history and legend was Bactra or Balkh, the "Mother of Cities," on the Bactrian plain near what is. now Mazar-i-Sharif, but the actual remains of this Graeco·Bactrian capital have never been found. Brilliant works of art from the later Buddhist period found south of the mountain passes at Begram, Hadda, and Ghandahara fill the Kabul Museum (Figs. 40-42) and illustrate an age when trade routes through the mountain axis connecting China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean brought together the civilizations of both east and west in the high mountain valleys of Afghanistan. This great period of Buddhist culture was succeeded by Islam and the rise of Arab power in the Middle East during the 7th and 8th cen- turies A.D. Although the Arabs fighting under their famed Omayyad and Abassid dynasties never fully subjugated the independent Afghans, Muslim civilization was established throughout most of the country, to remain dominant even to the present day. But the great period of Islamic culture also ended with another invasion, that of Mongols under Gbengis Khan in the 12th century. As in the rest of central Asia and the near east, endless ruins in Afghanistan mark Islamic cities destroyed by the Mongol hordes (Fig. 43). It is the pre-Buddhist history of Afghanistan which remains to be discovered. Actual written history began with the Alexandrian con- quest, but there is every reason to believe that remains of advanced cultures will be found which date from the second and third millennia 50 Figures 40-42. Buddhas and a head brought from Hadda and Begratn, now in the Kabul Museum. Figure 43. Rutns of an Islamic city near Bamian wbich was destroyed by Genghis Khan.

before the Christian era. The provinces of Bactria and Herat are the legendary home of the Aryans who invaded India some time about 1500 B.C., and also the claimed birthplace of Zarathustra who, a thousand years before Christ, brought a monotheistic religion and the sacred literature known as the Zend,Avesta to the Afghans and Per' sians. Archaeological exploration in these two provinces of Afghan, istan has only begun. Future discoveries here may be as important as that of the Mohenjo,Daro civilization on the Indus River. Pumpelley's excavations at Anau in Turkestan and the University Museum's work at Tureng,Tepe and at Hotu Cave in northern Iran also point the way to discovery in northern Afghanistan. Shibar Pass, 194 kilometers north of Kabul, divides the waters of the Oxus from those of the Indus. Today a yeat'tound motor road climbs 9,800 feet to this rampart connecting the Hindu Kush and Koh,i,Baba ranges but the camel caravans of several thousand years still move their cargoes in competition with the Afghan mail. This is one of the ancient passes from Persia and Turkestan to India and on the old caravan trail which leads through Khyber Pass to the south and east out into the Indus Valley. We managed to reach the pass early 52 Figure 44. One of the colossal Buddhas, now faceless , cut from the cliffs at Bamian.

in the afternoon in our much battered jeep after a pre- dawn start from Kabul. We bad crossed the Kapiso region, passed through Cbari- kar, and climbed up through the Gharband Valley, wliich is like a steep corridor through towering snow-cap- ped mountains. This is the Great Road (Rah-i-Kalan) and it is said that Alexander passed this way to the Bac- trian Plain in 328 B.C. Dur- ing the early morning hours we had shared the road with long ranks of Afghan cavalry and no westerner like myself could fail to be excited by Plwt<>(Jrl,7)h by Srlrnyler Camnw111;, the horses. There are valleys in Afghanistan which are famous for particularly fine breeds of horses and the road to Charikar that morning was one continual horse-show. Although the troops had the colorless quality of all modern armies the horses and the men were the same as those w ho have terrorized the sedentary farmers of the southern river plains since the beginning of history. Low clouds and a cold rain exaggerated the darkness of ominous Bululah Gorge as we descended northward from Shibar. Sheer rock walls seemed to close off the defile at every turn and forbid any ad- vance into Asia. But at the Shi.kari-Bamian crossroads we turned up the Bamian Valley and entered an enchanted world. A deep green valley Aoor, sheer red cliffs and brill.iant white peaks in the distance make the setting for a lost world of the age of Buddha. Barnian is to a westerner one of the most remote mountain valleys in the world- eleven days of driving from Teheran- and certainly one of the most 53 beautiful. And it is a silent, sleeping, ghost of two remote civiliza- tions which have determined the character of central Asia. Two giant faceless Buddhas, the largest 17 S feet high, rise above the valley in niches cut from a red precipice. About the beginning of the Christian era Bamian was the famous Buddhist city of cliff dwellers whose 1200 chambers housed priests, scholars and artists as well as administrators and traders in an eerie sanctuary nearly 9000 feet above thef la ins of Asia (Fig. 44). Some seven or eight centuries later followers o Moham- med dispersed the dwellers in caves, cut away the face of the Buddhas and built the fortress of Ghalghala (Fig. 45) within view of the colossal figures which once gazed across the valley at the Koh-i-Baba peaks. Today the ruined towers of the fortress are called Maobaligh (the ac- cursed); a few simple farmers and herders occupy cliff chambers about the Buddhas and the smoke of wood fires incrusts the lovely murals of the Kushan kings.

Ahmad Ali Kohzad had worked with M. Hackin of the French Archaeological Delegation in their study of ancient Bamian and through his knowledge of the past we could recover something of its meaning. But the wonder of the valley needs no explanation. Hundreds of the chambers of the red cliff open out toward the breath-taking view of the Koh-i-Baba range and, as we climbed through the endless passages, stair wells, and chambers in the rock to break out at windows or lie on the vast head of Buddha looking up at the charming frescoes of danc- ing girls and musicians, I could easily understand why religious leaders of two great civilizations should choose this remote valley for sanc- tuary. Even today the cares and conflicts of everyday existence are lost in the gorges and the snowy slopes. The farmers and herders of the valley now live in high-walled villages of medieval character, but they seemed to me closer in time to ancient Bamian than to modern Kabul.

Bamian is a personal experience which cannot be described. It must appeal to every man like James Hilton's visionary Shangri-la. Measurements of carved figures, details of lofty carved chambers, sketches of bright frescoes, all add up to nothing but an archaeological study. But in the mind two great civilizations rise out of the mists of time, apprehensions disappear, and the current conflict in Asia recedes to its proper proportion in the scale of centuries. 54 Figur, 45. Fortress of Ghalghala and the valley floor of Bamian.

Once through the Bululah Gorge the old caravan trail, now the motor road, follows cheerful streams through opening canyons of fan- tastic color down to the gateway to Bactria. Turkomans, Tajiks, and Uzbegs, those nomadic people of the northern steppes, were beginning to appear in the mountain valleys on their summer grazing grounds and we realized we had passed from southern to central Asia at its core. As everywhere in Afghanistan, these people are friendly and cheerful, always willing to aid a wandering stranger as if he were some young and irresponsible child. Mechanical troubles plagued us, particularly a leaky radiator, and there was always an ex-camel driver, now an expert truck driver and mechanic, to help. For example, at Doab where there is one of the finest government rest houses and a new coal mine, a migrating tinker and an Afghan mail-truck driver took the in- furiating jeep in hand and put us back into commission. The tinker asked a very modest fee for his work but the driver refused a tip and left us feeling discourteous for having offered. As it had in Mashhad, Iran, my conviction grew that life is better the farther you go from the westernized Asiatic cities. If there are any Afghan "bandits" they must have much in common with Robin Hood. Misinformation which damns a strange and unknown country is quick to be repeated, perhaps because it is more exciting. Reality is more prosaic and more pleasant. 55 Professor Daniel Schlumberger and his party from the French Arch- aeological Delegation were encamped on the ruins of a Kushan dynasty city north of Puh-Khumri digging Greek column bases out of mid- brick walls in one of those curious blends of east and west which are characteristic of Afghanistan. Archaeologists like other scholars and scientists have their own international guild without frontiers or export controls. Most of the information I needed for decisions about our future excavations was supplied by Professor Schlumberger and by Mr. Kohzad on the basis of their previous surveys and excavations. It is clear that the most promising areas for archaeological discovery are the Bactrian Plain north of the mountain barrier, the province of Herat at the broad pass between the Elburz and the Hindu Kush ranges, and the desert valley of the Helmand river. The great problem is the loca- tion of pre-Buddhist and prehistoric settlements. And Afghanistan with all its vast unexplored regions lying astride the ancient frontier at the cross-roads of the Eurasian land mass offers a greater challenge than any other region I know. We left Afghanistan by way of Khyber Pass into the valley of the Indus going down against the flood of nomads on their way up to sum- mer grass. It is only twelve hours by jeep from Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan, but in that time we crossed the cold grim Lataband Pass which reminded me of frigid passes in Alaska, the rich tropical valley of Jalalabad, a blistering desert west of Loe Dakka, and the barren rocky hills of the Khyber which are not unlike regions in our own southwestern states. Suddenly in a blinding sandstorm on the desert we came upon another encampment of nomads and I felt a sharp sensa- tion of time and space condensed. Across that same desert and through similar sandstorms had passed the Veddic Aryans on their way to In- dia, the Zoroastrian followers of Zarathustra, Alexander's Macedon- ian troops, highly civilized Buddhist missionaries taking their faith and their learning to inner Asia and China, the Arabic soldiers of Islam, the Mongol hordes, the cavalry of many Afghan kings, and most re- cently the British expeditionary forces. Who precedes and who fol- lows? Only one thing is certain. There, always, are the nomads and their flocks crossing and recrossing with the timeless regularity of the tides. F ROELlCH RAINEY

56