The twelfth satrapy comprised Balkh and Badakshan--what is now known as Afghan Turkistan. It was here that, generations before Alexander's campaign, those Greek settlements were founded by Darius and Xerxes which have left to this day living traces of their existence in the places originally allotted to them. In Afghan Turkistan also was founded the centre of Greek dominion in this part of Asia after the conquest of Persia, and it is impossible to avoid the conviction that there was a connection between these two events. The Greeks took the country from the Bakhi; but there are no people of this name left in these provinces now. They may (as Bellew suggests) be recognized again in the Bakhtyari of Southern Persia, but it seems unlikely; and it is far more probable that they were obliterated by Alexander as his most active opponents after he passed Aria (Herat) and Drangia (Seistan). The sixteenth satrapy was north of the Oxus, and included Sogdia and Aria (Herat). South of Aria was the fourteenth satrapy, represented by Seistan and Western Makran, with "the islands of the sea in which the King settles transported convicts"; and east of this again was the seventeenth satrapy covering Southern Baluchistan and Eastern Makran. It is only during the last twenty-five years that an accurate geographical knowledge of these uninviting regions has been attained. The gradual extension of the red line of the Indian border, with the necessity for preserving peace and security, has gradually enveloped Makran and Persian Baluchistan, the Gadrosia and Karmania of the Greeks, and has brought to light many strange secrets which have been dormant (for they were no secrets to the traveller of the Middle Ages) for a few centuries prior to the arrival of the British flag in Western India. It is an inhospitable country which is thus included. "Mostly desert," as one ancient writer says; marvellously furrowed and partitioned by bands of sun-scorched rocky hills, all narrow and sharp where they follow each other in parallel waves facing the Arabian Sea, or massed into enormous square-faced blocks of impassable mountain barrier whenever the uniform regularity of structure is lost. And yet it is a country full not only of interest historical and ethnographical, such as might be expected of the environment of a series of narrow passages leading to the western gates of India, but of incident also. There are amongst these strange knife-backed volcanic ridges and scarped clay hills valleys of great beauty, where the date-palms mass their feathery heads into a forest of green, and below them the fertile soil is moist and lush with cultured vegetation. But we have described elsewhere this strangely mixed land, and we have now only to deal with the aspect of it as known to the Greeks before the days of Alexander. That knowledge was ethnographical in its quality and exceedingly slight in quantity. Herodotus mentions the Sagartoi, Zarangai, Thamanai, Uxoi, and Mykoi.