sets out again, babbling sweetly as it goes, into the open, just a dimpled stream, leaving lonely pools in silent places on its way, and breaking up into a hundred streamlets to gladden the mountain people with the gift of irrigation. It is impossible to describe these frontier waterways. There is nothing like them to be found amidst scenes less wild and less fantastic than their frontier cradles. But full of local light and colour (and local tragedy too) as they surely are, they are unimportant in the military economy of the frontier, and their very wildness and impassability have saved them from the steps of the great horde of Indian immigrants. When, however, we reach still farther southward to the straight passes leading to Quetta, we are once again in a land of history. It is there we find by far the most open gates and those most difficult to shut, although the value of them as military approaches is very largely discounted by the geographical conditions of Western India at the point where they open on to the Indus frontier. Quetta, Kalat, and Las Bela, standing nearly in line from north to south, are the watch-towers of the western marches. Quetta and Kalat stand high, surrounded by wild hill country. Magnificent cliff-crowned mountains overlooking a wilderness of stone-strewed spurs embrace the little flat plain on which Quetta lies crumpled. Here and there on the plain an isolated smooth excrescence denotes an extinct volcano. Such is the Miri, now converted into the protecting fort of Quetta. The road from Quetta to the north-west, _i.e._ to Kandahar and Herat, has to pass through a narrow hill-enclosed space some eight miles from Quetta; and this physical gateway is strengthened and protected by all the devices of which military engineering skill is capable, whilst midway between Quetta and Kandahar is the formidable Khojak range which must always have been a trouble to buccaneers from the north-west. From Quetta to the south-east extends that road and that railway which, intersecting the complicated rampart of frontier hills, finally debouches into the desert plains round Jacobabad in Sind. Kalat is somewhat similarly situated. High amongst the mountains, Kalat also commands the approaches to an important pass to the plains, _i.e._ the Mula, a pass which in times gone by was a commercial high-road, but which has long been superseded by the Quetta passes of Harnai and Bolan (or Mashkaf). Las Bela is an insignificant Baluch town in the valley of the Purali, and at present commands nothing of value. But it was not always insignificant, as we shall see, and if its military value is not great at present, Las Bela must have stood full in the tide of human immigration to India for centuries in the past. It is a true gateway, and the story of it belongs to a period more ancient than any.