Nasar Khan, a Subadar, or native officer, of the 59th Sind Rifles. We now leave the Khyber region and, following the Indus for some six hundred miles, we travel southward through a land which was not very long ago a desert. To-day, as the result of a great investment of British capital, irrigation works have changed the whole aspect of the country. The provinces of the Punjab and Sind have hitherto been regarded as significant chiefly in relation to the defence of the Northwest Frontier of India. They have now no less importance when considered in their economic development. The plain of the Indus has become one of the chief wheatfields of the British Empire, for wheat is the principal crop in the Punjab, in parts of Sind, and outside the basin of the Indus itself, in the districts of the United Provinces which lie about Agra. The wheat production of India on an average of years is five times as great as that of the United Kingdom, and about half as great as that of the United States. In one recent year at least, the export of wheat from India to the United Kingdom has exceeded that from the United States to the United Kingdom. The brown waste of the plains of the Punjab becomes after the winter rains a waving sea of green wheat extending over thousands of square miles. Cultivation now spreads far beyond the area within which the rainfall alone suffices. The lower Punjab and the central strip of Sind have been converted into a second Egypt. Though the navigation of the Indus is naturally inferior to that of the Ganges, yet communication has been maintained by boat from the Punjab to the sea from Greek times downward. The Indus flotilla of steamboats has, however, suffered fatally from the competition of the Northwestern Railway, and the wheat exported from Karachi is now almost wholly rail-borne.