{"book":"adl1197","page":80,"text":"- 67 -\n\nthe Sikhs, and the discussion of that subject requires closer study. This line, however, was the one which passed between the river Indus and the mountains of the tribes on the fringes of the plains-agricultural plains-and the foothills and rocky defiles of the west. In other words, it was a boundry line which divided the agricultural plains from the rocky mountains of the clansmen of Pushtunistan: and the mountain dwellers of the tribes were beyond that line. In spite of the fact that the English territory could be defined as lying beyond that line; that is, on the east and the south-east of the course of the Indus river; and beyond that lay on the north and north-west the independent country of Afghanistan and the independent tribesmen: yet the English sought to establish a firm and permanent frontier line beyond which they may rest secure in their Indian possessions.\n\nAs every one knows, and history, geography, literature, legends and traditions bear witness: the natural and pilitical and historical boundry of India is no other than the course of the river Indus which arising in the far north at Gilgit and courses straight down to south till it debauches itself in the Indian ocean. This, line, too, seperates Afghanistan from India; and it is a dividing line, which nature has quite obviously created for that purpose. Historical precedences in this regard are always recorded; and every body knows of this fact. The knowledge of this fact, too, persuades some better informed Englishmen to consider that when they had reached the banks of the Indus, then they have touched their natural boundry line in the west.\n\nAmongst the English officers, the man who accepted the river Abasin as the boundry of their territory was Lord Lawrence, who had a great deal of administrative experience of the Punjab administration. His cry was always \"back to the Indus\". His views were that Kohat and the protruding areas of the tribes would go beyond the Peshawar area by any other boundry line than the one drawn along the Indus river. Also, that the stationing of British troops in the Peshawar area was not conducive of a healthy life for British troops. For this reason Lord Lawrence considered that the river Indus was the best boundry line .","chars":2263,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00080.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/80","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/80","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}