At length, on December 10th, 1838, Cotton began the long march which was not to terminate at Cabul until August 6th of the following year. The most direct route was across the Punjaub, and up the passes from Peshawur, but the Governor-General had shrunk from proposing to Runjeet Singh that the force should march through his territories, thinking it enough that the Maharaja had permitted Shah Soojah's heir, Prince Timour, to go by Peshawur to Cabul, had engaged to support him with a Sikh force, and had agreed to maintain an army of reserve at Peshawur. The chosen route was by the left bank of the Sutlej to its junction with the Indus, down the left bank of the Indus to the crossing point at Roree, and from Sukkur across the Scinde and northern Belooch provinces by the Bolan and Kojuk passes to Candahar, thence by Khelat-i-Ghilzai and Ghuznee to Cabul. This was a line excessively circuitous, immensely long, full of difficulties, and equally disadvantageous as to supplies and communications. On the way the column would have to effect a junction with the Bombay force, which at Vikkur was distant 800 miles from Ferozepore. Of the distance of 850 miles from the latter post to Candahar the first half to the crossing of the Indus presented no serious difficulties, but from Sukkur beyond the country was inhospitable and cruelly rugged. It needed little military knowledge to realise how more and yet more precarious would become the communications as the chain lengthened, to discern that from Ferozepore to the Indus they would be at the mercy of the Sikhs, and to comprehend this also, that a single serious check, in or beyond the passes, would involve all but inevitable ruin.