There is one ragged and time-worn city in Afghan Turkistan which certainly belongs to the centuries preceding the era of Alexander--it was the capital of Baktria, the city of Bessos, and it has been a great centre of commerce, a city of pilgrimage, Buddhist and Mahomedan, for many a century since. This is Balkh, traditionally known as the "Mother of cities," whose foundation is variously ascribed to Nimrud, or to "Karomurs the Persian Romulus," Assyrian or Persian as the fancy strikes the narrator. Of its extreme antiquity there can be no doubt. It is certain that at a very early date it was the rival of Ecbatana, of Nineveh, and of Babylon. Bricks with inscriptions are said to have been found there some seventy years ago, and similar bricks should certainly be there still. Officers of the Russo-Afghan Boundary Commission passed through modern Balkh in 1884, but no such bricks were found during the very cursory and entirely superficial examination which was all that could be made of the place; square bricks, without inscription, of the size and quality of those which may any day be dug out of the Birs Nimrud at Babylon were certainly found, and point to a similarity of construction in a part of the ancient walls, which is surely not accidental. Modern Balkh consists of about 500 houses of Afghan settlers, a colony of Jews, and a small bazaar set in the midst of a waste of ruins and many acres of debris. The walls of the city are 6½ or 7 miles in perimeter; in some places they are supported by a rampart like the walls of Herat. These, of course, are modern, as is the fort and citadel, or Bala Hissar, which stands on a mound to the north-east. The green cupola of the Masjid Sabz and the arched entrance to the ruined Madrasa testify to modern Mahomedan occupation, as do the Top-i-Rustam and the Takht-i-Rustam (two ancient topes) to the fervour of religious zeal with which its Buddhist inhabitants invested it in the early centuries of our era. Balkh awaits its Layard, and not only Balkh, for there are mounds and ruins innumerable scattered through the breadth of the Balkh plain.