Before Indian administrators had seriously turned their attention to the Afghan buffer-land and set to work to fill up "intelligence" material at second hand, there was at least one active European agent in the field who was in direct touch with the chief political actors in that strange land of everlasting unrest, and who has left behind him a record which is unsurpassed on the Indian frontier for the width of its scope of inquiry into matters political, social, economic, and scientific, and the general accuracy of his conclusions. This was the American, Masson. It must be remembered that the Punjab and Sind were almost as much _terra incognita_ to us in 1830 as was Afghanistan. The approach to the latter country was through foreign territory. The Sikh chiefs of the Punjab and the Amirs of Sind were not then necessarily hostile to British interests. They watched, no doubt, the gradual extension of the red line of our maps towards the north-west and west, and were fully alive to the probability that, so far as regarded their own countries, they would all soon be "painted red." But there was no official discourtesy or intoleration shown towards European travellers, and in the Sikh-governed Punjab, at any rate, much of the military control of that most military nationality was in the hands of European leaders. Nor do we find much of the spirit of fanatical hatred to the Feringhi even in Afghanistan at that time. The European came and went, and it was only due to the disturbed state of the country and the local absence of law and order that he ran any risk of serious misadventure.