Indian frontier, Mahmud of Ghazni, early in the eleventh century, who is said to have swept down with hordes of irregular cavalry through the band of hills which heads the Tochi Valley with a rapidity that seems incredible in these days, and to have laid waste the Indus Valley from Bannu to Multan.... The Tochi,[135] moreover, dominates much of the northern hills of Waziristan. We have not yet shut off Waziristan from Afghanistan, and the Wazirs will be as ripe for mischief in the future as in the past. But Waziristan is now dovetailed in between the Gomal and the Tochi, and the influence of our military pressure north and south, as well as east, cannot fail to make for peace and good order.... If there is so much to be said for the occupation of the Tochi (a more or less isolated valley) surely there is yet more to be said for the occupation of the Gomal. The Tochi Valley leads nowhere, so far as we are concerned at present.... The Gomal is the most important pass between the Khyber and the Bolan. It gives access to the very centre of Afghanistan from India. It is the regular highway for thousands of trading and fighting people who bring their Kafilas yearly to India.... From Wana we not only dominate the southern Waziri valleys, but we round off the line of frontier outposts which hold all the wild people of the Suleiman mountains in check from Quetta to Waziristan. It secures the end of the chain, and can itself be supported and fed either from India by the Gomal Pass, or from Quetta by the Zhob Valley.” [Sidenote: The Tochi and the Gomal] Some explanation of this last sentence is necessary; at Khajuri Kach—“the plain of palms,” trees which, by the way, are here said to be conspicuous by their absence—the Zhob River flows into the Gomal, and here the road bifurcates, that along the Zhob Valley leading to Quetta, the other continuing north-west along the Gomal to Ghazni. Further on again, at Domandi, the Gomal is joined by a river called the Kundar, the valley route of which leads directly to Kandahar. Of the approach to Ghazni by the Tochi we know that it is easy enough, for we have made it so, as far as Sheranni, and thence onward to the Katanni Kotal very difficult, steep and broken; but we know practically nothing of the road between the head of the Katanni Pass and Ghazni. Of the Gomal route, so far as Domandi and Wana is familiar enough, but we would give much to know more than we do of the country beyond.