Page 25

12 is grown, and the cultivation is confined to the narrow banks of the rivers and streams. This irregular tableland has been scored and eroded by centuries of river action. From here emerge some of the greatest rivers of Afghanistan. To the north the river Khulm (Tashqurghan) and the Balkh take a hurried start for the plains of Bactria; westward the Hari Rud streams off to Herat; southward extend the long curving lines of the Helmand, Harut, Khash Rud and Arghandab, and eastward flows the Kabul with its various branches. A rugged mountain mass, called the Koh-i-Baba and Firoz Koh, the lineal continuation of the Hindu Kush, dominates this rolling plateau from the North. Taken as a whole these Hazara uplands may be described as one would describe Tibet—a rolling, heaving, desolate tableland, wrinkled and intersected by narrow mountain ranges, whose peaks run from 13,000 to 14,000 feet in altitude, enclosing between them restricted spaces and pasture-land. (6) The Arachosian Plain. This lies to the southwest. Here are the fertile districts of Kandahar and Zamindawar, watered by the Arghandab and the Helmand respectively. But the southwestern corner of this region constitutes a vast sandy tract, called Seistan. It is a flat, unwholesome country extending on either side of the Helmand. It owes its place in history and its reputation of enormous productiveness to the fact that it is the great central basin of Afghanistan, where the Helmand and nearly half-a-dozen other Afghan rivers run to a finish in vast swamps and lagoons. Surrounded by vast deserts on all sides, Seistan itself is seldom waterless, and there was, in days that can hardly be called ancient, a really fine system of irrigation, which fertilized a large tract of now unproductive land. The soil of Seistan is alluvial and consists chiefly of sand mixed with clay. A part of the surface shows moving sands. The land is generally flat, but there are a few low sandy hills.