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10 a great plateau with an average height of some six thousand feet, with the Hindu Kush as its backbone. On all sides this plateau descends abruptly to lowland, save in the north-east, where it rises to the lofty Pamirs. To the south of the country lies the arid land called Seistan and Garmser, the average height here being 1,600 feet. Towards the north of the Hindu Kush it slopes away into another depressed tract as far as the Amu (the Oxus)—a vast plain of loess. Eastwards there is a sudden drop into the Indus basin. The central mountain range, or more properly ranges, dwindle away into the steppes and Namaksars (salt-deserts), lying north of Herat, where they meet the line of the Elburz coming from the opposite direction. The highest part of this plateau is the Pamir, more familarly known as "Bam-i-Dunya" (the Roof of the World). It is a vast plateau with a series of narrow valleys, having steeply sloping sides, the average height being ten to twelve thousand feet, while many of its intervening peaks run up to 18,000 feet and over. Here the characteristic types of landscape are "tent-shaped, glacier coated mountains, divided by broad easy gaps, heights bare of verdure and shorn of forests and a land of desolate lakes—a region where for the greater part of the year there is neither fuel nor fodder, an Engadine of Asia, with nine months "winter and three months cold weather; the home of wild sheep and shaggy yak, and the summer haunt of a few wandering shepherds." Physically the country may easily be divided into eight distinct regions: (1) The Broad Lowland of Ancient Bactria:—This lies to the north between the Oxus and the massive mountain system of Tirband-i-Turkestan and the Hindu Kush. The rivers that rise in these mountains and flow to the north almost