The whole of the country lying immediately to the west of the Punjab, and between it and the kingdom of Afghanistan, is held by the two great nations of Pathan and Baluch, the former lying to the north and the latter to the south of a line drawn from the western face of the Suleiman Mountains opposite Dera Ghazi Khan, almost due west to Quetta. The land, then, of the Pathans may be said to comprise the regions of the Sufed Koh and the Suleiman and adjacent mountains with their numerous offshoots; and their territory may be considered roughly to be enclosed by the River Indus on the east, by Afghanistan on the west, Baluchistan on the south, and on the north by Kashmir and the Kunar River—a veritable _tangle_ of brown hills. “It is a long strip of unutterably rugged country; stony barren heights, deep abrupt valleys seamed by occasional torrents; the farms represented by a patch of corn on a hillside or a scrap of cultivation on a narrow strip of alluvial soil alongside a mountain stream. No highways, save those made by us; the village roads—mere tracks straggling over hills and among the roughest ravines—always difficult and often dangerous. The dwelling places, fortified towers or caves among the hills.” The Pathan territories occupy many thousand square miles of mountainous country through which flow the Gomal, the Kurram, the Zhob, the Kabul and other smaller rivers with their tributaries, the principal tributaries of the Kabul River being the Chitral, the Bara, the Swat and the Kalpani. The rainfall in this region is scanty and uncertain, and agriculture can only properly be carried on in those tracts watered by these rivers. The language of the Pathan is called Pushtu or Pukhtu, according as it is the softer Kandahari dialect or the hard guttural speech of the Peshawar Valley, the line which separates the two being the northern boundary of the Khattak tract in Kohat and the south-east corner of the Peshawar District. It is only since the fourteenth century that Pushtu has attained the dignity of a written language. And what of the men who speak it? What is a Pathan? [Sidenote: Pathan Descent]