It is far more impossible to identify the actual sites of Alexander's first military engagements than it is to say, for instance, at this period of history, where Cæsar landed in Great Britain, as we have no means of making exhaustive local inquiries; but subsequent history clearly indicates that his next step after settling the Laghman tribes was to push on to the valley of the Choaspes, or Kunar. It was in the Kunar valley that he found and defeated the chief of the Aspasians. The Kunar River is by far the most important of the northern tributaries of the Kabul. It rises under the Pamirs and is otherwise known as the Chitral River. The Kunar valley is amongst the most lovely of the many lovely valleys of Afghanistan. Flanked by the snowy-capped mountains of Kashmund on the west, and the long level water parting which divides it from Bajaor and the Panjkora drainage on the east, it appears, as one enters it from Jalalabad, to be hemmed in and constricted. The gates of it are indeed somewhat narrow, but it widens out northward, where the ridges of the lofty Kashmund tail off into low altitudes of sweeping foothills a few miles above the entrance, and here offer opportunity for an easy pass across the divide from the west into the valley. This is a link in the oldest and probably the best trodden route from Kabul to the Punjab, and it has no part with the Khaibar. It links together these northern valleys of Laghman, Kunar, and Lundai (_i.e._ the Panjkora and Swat united) by a road north of the Kabul, finally passing southwards into the plains chequered by the river network above Peshawur.