The trans-frontier portion of the Khyber route to Kabul is described by Oliver as follows: “Over the Lundi Khana Pass, called the Kotal,[105] the road rises by a steep ascent between steep cliffs less than 150 feet apart, and down again till the Valley of the Kabul River is reached at Dakka.... At Jalalabad—ninety miles from Peshawar—the cross ranges of hills are, for a change, replaced by a well-watered fertile stretch of country, a score of miles long by a dozen wide, dotted with towers, villages and trees; and where the Kabul River—that has all along had to struggle through mere cracks—becomes a broad clear stream 100 yards wide. Thence the route lies through a thoroughly unattractive country again, over long stony ridges, across rocky river beds, varied with an occasional fine valley like Fathabad, or an oasis like Nimlah, to Gandamak, which, by way of comparison with what is beyond again, is a land flowing with milk and honey; for on by Jagdalak and the Lataband Pass, or Tezin and the Khurd Kabul, is a wild waste of bare hills, surrounded by still more lofty and forbidding mountains. The teeth become more closely set together; the road narrower; the stony ridges change to bleak heights from 7000 to 8000 feet high, the river beds, deep valleys, or narrow defiles, like the fatal Jagdalak, almost devoid of verdure, and into whose gloomy ravines the winter sun can hardly penetrate—these are the outworks that have to be negotiated before the gardens and orchards, the bazaars and forts of Kabul, can be approached.” The _Aka Khel_ clan occupies the hills to the south-west of Peshawar between the Bara River and the country of the Adam Khels, also the Bara and the Waran Valleys. It was in the Waran Valley and in the house of that firebrand among the border clergy, Saiyid Akbar, that there was found, during the course of the Tirah expedition, the whole of the inflammatory correspondence which had passed between the Afridi maliks and mullahs prior to and during the Pathan revolt of 1897. This clan is Samil in politics and can put 4000 armed men in the field. [Sidenote: The Adam Khels]