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Scottish Geographical Magazine ISSN: 0036-9225 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsgj19 A ride from Quetta to Loralai Lieutenant‐Colonel A. C. Yate To cite this article: Lieutenant‐Colonel A. C. Yate (1906) A ride from Quetta to Loralai, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 22:9, 453-459, DOI: 10.1080/00369220608733664 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00369220608733664 Published online: 27 Feb 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 4 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsgj20 Download by: [La Trobe University] Date: 01 June 2016, At: 14:47 THE SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE. A RIDE FROM QUETTA TO LORALAI. By Lieutenant-Colonel A. C. YATE. BALUCHISTAN is a wide word. I am not prepared at the present moment to express it in terms of European states, which is a popular and effective way of setting forth the vast area (often area et prceterea nihil, for the population is scant) of some of these Oriental provinces of ours. It extends east and west from the Punjab to the Persian frontier, and north and south from Afghanistan to the sea. It is ruled by a Chief Commissioner. It was made by Sir Kobert Sandeman, the first Chief Commissioner. Baluchistan must be written about by sections. It is too large to be treated of as a whole in a brief paper. I am tempted to write of the Quetta-Loralai road section, for I think that of all it is the most beauti- ful and picturesque. My wife and I had occasion in June 1896 to visit Quetta, and after a pleasant stay there, a ride along the extended belt of fortifications, and a delightful run in a trolley through the Khojak tunnel to Chaman, we made up our minds to conclude our trip with a Downloaded by [La Trobe University] at 14:47 01 June 2016 ride from Quetta via Kach and Ziarat to Loralai. Whenever strangers hear the name Loralai, it carries their thoughts away to the Lurlei of the Ehine, and they instinctively remark," What a pretty name!" I have always felt a curious interest in the origin of this name. It was quite unknown till the Indian Government founded the cantonment now so called. A most reliable authority assures me that the founder of Baluchistan was asked to provide a name for the new cantonment, and suggested "Loralai." A name is nothing if not appropriate. "Loralai" is appropriate. "Lora" means "a river- bed," "lai" means "tamarisk." Dry stony torrent-beds overgrown with tamarisk are a marked feature in the Loralai landscape. But let us leave Loralai for the present (it should be the Omega and not the Alpha of this short sketch), and revert to our ride there from Quetta. VOL. XXII. 2 K 454 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE We had two horses and half a dozen mules for the carriage of our- selves, servants, and baggage. As luck would have it (possibly the syces, i.e. grooms, knew more about it than luck did) my wife's Arab was found seriously lame thirty-six hours before we had to start. How- ever, a transport mule-tonga kindly lent us and a pony picked up at the last moment pulled us out of that pinch. A tonga is a low two-wheeled cart with seats for two in front (one the driver) and two behind. The seats are arranged to hold baggage. It is drawn by two ponies or mules. The feature of tonga harness is the iron bar which passes over the ponies' withers and links them. This harness is strong and serviceable, .->,*,. -*. */»•. v *\ \ * • ? - ~" '•-"7.- .-^r£h: 3C&&Z -i. •/*••-' „••:.• i":^Wwi-'J :^ The houss of the Officer Commandiag the troops of the Khan of Kalat, Baluchistan. Taken at Kalat in 1904. and admits of rapid changes of animals. The tonga is used on all the Downloaded by [La Trobe University] at 14:47 01 June 2016 government postal roads in India, e.g. between Kalka and Simla, Gauhati and Shillong (Assam), etc. We started to time, sent the two horses, pony, and mules ahead on the afternoon of the 28th June, and start- ing ourselves in the tonga at daybreak on the 29th, overtook the advanced party twenty miles out at nine o'clock. Our road ran west, first for seven or eight miles across the stony Quetta plain, then up and up for another six or seven, following the course of ravines and spurs amid the lower slopes of Takatu, one of the highest peaks (over 11,000 feet) near Quetta, and skirting the rear of the right or south-west flank of the Quetta defences. At Sarakulla the summit of the pass is approached. Gandak, where we overtook our horses and servants, and breakfasted, was a good four miles (all down .hill) west of the head of the pass. A A RIDE FROM QUETTA TO LORALAI. 455 little low bungalow with a corrugated iron roof and tiny rooms, and the air shut out by the encircling hills—such was Gandak. It is ungrateful to carp at a shelter that was, after all, only too welcome in the heat of the last days of June; but we were very glad when 3 P.M. arrived and we judged we might mount (the tonga was sent back from Jandak) and ride on to Kach, nine or ten miles further. The direct rays of the sun tempered by a breeze were less trying than the still heat in closed rooms under an iron roof. This was the only day during our march that we really felt the heat. The average elevation of the road from Quetta to Loralaiis probably over 6000 feet; and that elevation secures in summer almost invariably, cool nights and bearably hot days. Of course we avoided riding, as a rule, between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M. The fourteen miles of country from Sarakullah to Kach bore on it Nature's brand of barrenness. High up were the bare rocks, while lower down on the slopes and in the ravines were massed in fantastic conglomeration what looks like Earth's dross, cast out by her own volcanic action as being too sterile or too poisonous to retain—a dross of many colours, red, brown, white, grey, slate, etc. All reflected forcibly the sun's rays. At Kach (a station on the Sind-Pishin railway) we found ourselves at a place which I had scarcely seen and never stopped at since August 1880. On that occasion, the night after my regiment passed through it, 2000Pathans attacked and rushed the little fort held by about 200 native infantry, and were with difficulty repulsed. From Kach to Ziarat the road winds through a wild mountainous country, the distance being between thirty and thirty-five miles. To the left or north the village of Amadun appears, picturesquely perched on the slopes of a side valley. On the right or south is the great dark mass of the Pil mountain, sparsely studded with junipers, whose twisted gnarled trunks and boughs fill one with wonder at the freaks and vagaries of Nature's handiwork. I know no such trees elsewhere except in Dora's illustrations of Dante's Inferno. These junipers (or " pencil cedars," as some call them) look the very victims of some sylvan demon. Their grim, weird forms, no two alike, disport themselves in tens of thousands on the mountains around Ziarat. The Pil rift and lake are other queer freaks of nature. The rift cuts through the great Pil mountain from the village of Kawas across to the well-known Chappar rift on the Sind-Pishin railway. The Pil lake is probably Downloaded by [La Trobe University] at 14:47 01 June 2016 the result of a landslip or some seismic disturbance, which has dammed the natural channel of the Pil river. The Cyclopean magnitude of Nature's works in these rifts of Baluchistan is what fills eye and mind with wonder. Every traveller who visits Quetta has seen how Sir James Browne and his staff of Koyal Engineers carried the railway through the Chappar rift. I was with a brigade that marched through it in August 1880. It is only two miles long or so, but it took us all day to get our camels and baggage through it. Ziarat is the hill-station of, and is some 2300 feet higher than, Quetta. Its great charm is that, in a country where natural vegetation is scant, it is abundantly wooded. Its real name is Gwashki, but it has been rechristened by some one Ziarat, and Ziarat it will remain. I 156 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE. wish I could depict the charm of its mountain scenery, the ravines luxuriant in all European vegetation, the wild cherry-trees, and currant and gooseberry bushes, the grand view of the appalling cliffs of Khalipat, (a mountain over 11,000 feet high), the queer "potholes" in the ravines where the explorer is brought to a sudden standstill with a sort of dry devil's caldron below him and perpendicular cliffs on either side above. The most striking of these " potholes " (waterfalls in raintime) is in " Lady Sandeman's Tangi " (gully or rift). The Pathans told us that only one man was ever known to have climbed from bottom' to top of it. To us such a feat seemed a sheer impossibility; but one or two of the Pathans with their bare, prehensile feet, showed us how part of the Pathan Levy Sowar.

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