indicated here and there, is now almost as well surveyed as Scotland. Afghanistan, however, is beyond our line, "out of bounds," and the result is that there are serious gaps in our map knowledge of the country of the Amir, gaps which there seems little probability of investigating under the present closure of the frontier to explorers. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF HINDU KUSH PASSES] By far the most important of these gaps are the uplands of Badakshan, stretching from the Oxus plains to the Hindu Kush. The plains of Balkh, as far east as Khulm and Tashkurghan, from whence the high-road leads to Haibak, Bamian, and the Hindu Kush passes, are fairly well mapped. The Oxus, to the north of Balkh, is well known, and the fords and passages of that river have been reckoned up with fair accuracy. From time immemorial every horde of Skythic origin, Nagas, Sakas, or Jatas, must have passed these fords from the hills and valleys of the Central Asian divide on their way to India. The Oxus fords have seen men in millions making south for the valleys of Badakshan and the Golden Gates of Central Asiatic ideal which lay yet farther south beyond the grim line of Hindu Kush. Balkh (the city) must have stood like a rock in the human tide which flowed from north to south. From the west, too, from Asia Minor and the Persian provinces, as well as from the Caspian steppes to the north-west, must have come many a weary band of tear-stained captives, transported across half a continent by their conquerors to colonize, build cities, and gradually amalgamate with the indigenous people, and so to disappear from history. From the west came Parthians, Medes, Assyrians, and Greeks, who did not altogether disappear. But no such human tide ever flowed into Badakshan from the east nor yet from the south. To the east are the barrier heights of the Pamirs. No crowd of fugitives or captives ever faced those bleak, inhospitable, wind-torn valleys that we know of. Nor can we find any trace of emigration from India. Yet routes were known across the Pamirs, and in due time, as we have seen, small parties of pilgrims from China made use of these routes, seeking for religious truth in Balkh when, as a Buddhist centre, Balkh was in direct connection with the Buddhist cities of Eastern Turkistan. And Buddhism itself, when it left India, went northward and flourished exceedingly in those same cities of the sandy plain, where the people talked and wrote a language of India for centuries after the birth of Christ. Balkh, however, never stayed the tide which overlapped it and, passing on, lost itself in the valleys under the Hindu Kush, or else, surmounting that range, streamed over into the Kabul basin. Whether the tide set in from north or west, the overflow was forced by purely geographical conditions into precisely the same channels, and in many cases it drifted into the hills and stayed there. What we should expect to find in Balkh, then (whenever Dr. Stein can get there), are