The people of the country are very chary of giving information of the existence of ores in their locality, fearing that if such are known to exist, the Amir will have the mines worked, and then the people of the neighbourhood will be pressed to labour on them, and as that means taking them away from their fields and crops to work hard and long on a small pay, the prospect does not appeal to them. Should the Amir decide to take advantage of the mineral wealth of his country, this is what would happen, no doubt; but, for some unknown reason, the Amir prefers that these mines, of the richness of which he is cognisant, should remain unworked; and yet he appointed several sappers and miners to prospect the whole of the country and bring in samples of all rocks, etc., which had the appearance of being of value and were different in colour and weight to the common rocks and earth; and these men were placed under me, and I had orders to go over the samples they brought in and assay and report on those which contained metals. From this I gathered the impression that the Amir eventually intended working the mines, but up to the time I left the country nothing had been said or done to this end. The lead ores are worked for the use of the Government, and the Amir has proved that his people are sufficiently intelligent to learn and carry out any work taught them, and he had sufficient confidence in my report on ores to send the lead-smelting men to work on another ore which I recommended when that of the old working ran out, so that it is difficult to understand why the exploitation of the mines is not put in hand; but I have sometimes thought that the Amir perhaps fears the cupidity of his powerful neighbours, should he by working the mines of his country give practical evidence of its richness, and thereby lose it. The people of Turkestan, when speaking of the richness of their country in mineral wealth, claim that it is much more wealthy than the rest of Afghanistan, but no ores from that country were sent to me for assay. One Turkistani chief brought with him, when on a visit to the Amir, an ore which he said contained gold, but it turned out to be iron pyrites. This chief is not the only man who has made that mistake, for ores of iron pyrites exemplify the old saying that all is not gold that glitters. At Durrah-i-Yusef, in Turkestan, a seam of coal outcrops in the valley, but it is new coal or lignite. The seam has been described to me as some six feet in thickness, and of considerable extent. There are many uses to which this coal could be put, and several tons of it were brought to Kabul to try as fuel in the boiler-house instead of wood, and the experiment was successful; but the cost of carrying the coal by camels over the intervening ranges of mountains, a three weeks’ journey, was prohibitive.