[Sidenote: 51. The Lansdowne Bridge.] [Sidenote: 52. The Same.] [Sidenote: 53. Khwaja Khizir Island.] Running southward through the fertile strip, not very far from the left or western bank of the river, the railway leaves the Punjab and enters Sind. At Rohri, one of the hottest places in all India in the summer time, a line branches northwestward to Quetta and Chaman, on the frontier of Afghanistan. Sukkur stands opposite to Rohri on the right bank of the river, and the Lansdowne Railway Bridge between these two towns is perhaps the most remarkable bridge in India. It was built between 1887 and 1889, and about three thousand tons of steel and iron were employed in its construction. It is eight hundred and forty feet in length, with two magnificent spans. We see in this slide a view of the Rohri end of it, taken from Suttian, an old nunnery founded for women who preferred seclusion rather than the funeral pyre. The Hindu custom was to burn the wife or wives with the husband’s body, until the British Government intervened to prevent the practice. One end of the town of Rohri, with its tall grey wattle and daub buildings, can be seen under the bridge. A train is upon the bridge, and in front are some Pala fishers, sailing on metal chatties into which they put the fish as they catch them. This is another view of the bridge seen from Rohri itself. We are here in the very heart of the rainless region. During twelve years there have only been six showers at Rohri! A great engineering scheme is now under consideration for damming the Indus near this point so as to raise the level of the water in the upper reaches of the river. In this manner the irrigation canals would be fed not only in time of flood, as at present, but in the dry season as well. Near Rohri, in the middle of the Indus channel, is Khwaja Khizir Island, on which stands an ancient Hindu temple. In the foreground of the picture near the water’s edge are Sindi boatmen mending their sails. From Sukkur, passing through Shikarpur and Jacobabad, the railway traverses the desert to the foot of the hills, and then ascends to Quetta either by the Mashkaf—the actual line of the Bolan having been abandoned—or by a longer loop line, the Harnai, which runs to the Peshin valley. The latter is the usual way. By the Mashkaf route the line is carried over a boulder-strewn plain about half a mile broad in the bottom of a gorge with steeply rising heights on either side. Here and there the strip of lower ground is trenched and split by deep canyons. At first the line follows the Mashkaf river, and the gradients are not very severe, but once Hirok, at the source of the Bolan river is passed, a gradient of one in twenty-five begins, and two powerful engines are required to drag the train up. The steep bounding ridges now close in on either side with cliffs rising almost perpendicularly to several hundred feet. Occasional block-houses high up amid the crags defend the Pass.