Until quite lately these seaboard approaches to India have been almost ignored by historians and military strategists (doubtless because so little was known about them), and the pages of recent text-books are silent concerning them. They lead outwards from the lower Indus valleys through Makran, either into Persia or to the coast ports of the Arabian Sea. From extreme Western Persia to the frontiers of India at Quetta, or indeed to the Indus delta, it is possible for a laden camel to take its way with care and comfort, never meeting a formidable pass, never dragging its weary limbs up any too steep incline, with regular stages and more or less good pasturage through all the 1400 or 1500 miles which intervene between Western Persia and Las Bela. From the pleasant palm groves of Panjgur in Makran to India, it might indeed be well to have an efficient local guide, and indeed from Las Bela to Karachi the road is not to be taken quite haphazard; nevertheless, if the camel-driver knew his way, he could not only lead his charge comfortably along a well-trodden route, but he might turn chauffeur at the end of his long march and drive an exploring party back in a motor. In the illimitable past it was this way that Dravidian peoples flocked down from Asiatic highlands to the borderland of India. Some of them remained for centuries either on the coast-line, where they built strange dwellings and buried each other in earthen pots, or they were entangled in the mass of frontier hills which back the solid Kirthar ridge, and stayed there till a Turco-Mongol race, the Brahuis (or Barohis, _i.e._ "men of the hills"), overlaid them, and intermixing with them preserved the Dravidian language, but lost the Dravidian characteristics. According to their own traditions a large number of these Brahuis were implanted in their wild and almost inaccessible hills by the conqueror Chenghiz Khan, and some of them call themselves Mingals, or Mongols, to this day. This seems likely to be true. It is always best to assume in the first instance that a local tradition firmly held and strongly asserted has a basis of fact to support it. Here are a people who have been an ethnological puzzle for many years, talking the language of Southern Indian tribes, but protesting that they are Mongols. Like the degenerate descendants of the Greeks in the extreme north-west, or like the mixed Arab peoples of the Makran coast and Baluchistan, these half-bred Mongols have preserved the traditions of their fathers and adopted the tongue of their mothers. It is strange how soon a language may be lost that is not preserved by the women! What we learn from the Brahuis is that a Dravidian race must once have been where they are now, and this supports the theory now generally admitted, that the Dravidian peoples of India entered India by these western gateways.