The villagers have their fortlets to retreat to, and, if they reach them, can pull the ladders over after them and fire away from their towers. Dadur is an insignificant town at the foot of the Bolan. From here the Kandahar road leads for sixty miles through the Pass--a gradual ascent; in winter there is not a mouthful of food in the entire length of the defile. Quetta, compared with the region to the south, appears a very Garden of Eden. It is a small oasis, green and well watered. From Quetta to Pishin the road skirts the southern border of a vast plain, interspersed with valleys, which extend across the eastern portion of Afghanistan toward the Russian dominion. A study of the Pishin country shows that it is, on its northwestern side supported on a limb of the Western Sulimani. This spur, which defines the west of the Barshor valley, is spread out into the broad plateau of Toba, and is then produced as a continuous ridge, dividing Pishin from the plains of Kadani, under the name of Khoja Amran. The Barshor is a deep bay of the plain, and there is an open valley within the outer screen of hills. A road strikes off here to the Ghilzai country and to Ghazni. Though intersected by some very low and unimportant hills and ridges, the Pishin plains and those of Shallkot may be looked upon as one feature. We may imagine the Shall Valley the vestibule, the Kujlak-Kakur Vale the passage, the Gayud Yara Plain an antechamber, and Pishin proper the great _salle_. Surrounded by mountains which give forth an abundant supply of water, the lands bordering on the hills are studded with villages, and there is much cultivation; there is a total absence of timber, and the cultivation of fruit-trees has been neglected. The Lora rivers cutting into the plain interferes somewhat with the construction of roads. [Illustration: Entrance to the Khojak Pass, from Pishin, on the Road to Kandahar.] The Plain of Pishin possesses exceptional advantages for the concentration and rendezvous of large bodies of troops, and has already been utilized for that purpose by the British. From the Khoja Amran, looking toward Kandahar, the plains, several thousand feet below, are laid out like a sea, and the mountains run out into isolated promontories; to the left the desert is seen like a turbulent tide about to overflow the plains. The rivers on the Quetta-Kandahar route do not present much impediment to the passage of troops in dry weather, but in flood they become serious obstacles and cannot be passed until the waters retire. The ascent from the east through the Khojak Pass is easy, the descent on the west very precipitous. A thirteen-foot cart road was made, over the entire length of twenty miles, by General Biddulph in 1878-9, by which the first wheeled vehicles, which ever reached Khorassan from India, passed.