A LAND OF MYSTERY 321 the strange beauty of this grand and spacious landscape one's thoughts travel involuntarily to the human interests bound up with it and the mystery in which they lie enveloped. For there are few regions, so closely connected with us by political ties of the first importance, with which we are so remotely in touch. For years past no European has crossed that frontieronly a stone's throw from the outposts of our Empire -except the few foreigners whom the Ameer has engaged for special purposes, and their opportunities of communicating freely with the outer world are few and far between. Twice a week a British escort receives at the frontier from an Afghan escort the trading caravan which brings down the produce of Afghanistan into the markets of India, and hands over to its charge the return caravan which supplies the demands of Kabul upon the industries of the West. The caravans pass up and down the road through the Khaibar with undisturbed regularity — hundreds of huge, ungainly, Central Asian camels, sure-footed and powerful, bellowing and gurgling under their heavy loads; big, broad-shouldered, bearded Afghans, shouting and blustering, but goodhumoured and easy-going, though their bold, erect carriage and the fierce gleam of their eyes show the mettle they are made of; and, every year at the approach of winter, hundreds of Pathan tribesmen-Mohmands, Hazaras-from the other side of the frontier, who troop down with their women and children, some of them blue-eyed and fair-haired like a northern race, with their herds and their flocks, with their dogs and their cats and their hens, to seek work and to find pastures for a time in the milder climate of the Peshawar plain. But when the caravans have passed the Khaibar closes its gates and all intercourse ceases as absolutely as if Y there were a Great Wall of China between India and Afghanistan. News, of course, does filter through, and the Indian Government has its own channels of communication, official and unofficial, with the Ameer and his people. But though there is an abundance of bazaar gossip at Peshawar and the whole frontier yields a lively crop of rumours, the amount of trustworthy information which can be obtained with regard to what is going on in Afghanistan is singularly scanty. Yet in the recesses of this untamed country which has survived in the heart of Asia as a relic of bygone ages, inaccessible to telegraphs and railways, or, indeed, to any but the warlike appliances of the modern world, great changes have been taking place during the last twenty years, of which the consequences may affect us at any moment more closely than anything that has happened during the same period in countries with which we are in daily and intimate contact. CHAPTER XXVII AFGHANISTAN AS A MILITARY STATE T may still be too early to assume that Habibullah has finally overcome the dangers which beset the path of a new ruler in a country such as Afghanistan, and he has yet to show the stuff of which he is made. But the fact that the internal peace of Afghanistan has remained unbroken since his succession to the throne bears, at any rate, very striking testimony to the constructive statesmanship of his father and to the solidity of the work he achieved. Two years have now elapsed since Abdurrahman died, and the authority of Kabul over the tribes remains in all appearances as unskaken as when the heavy hand of the old Ameer was still upon them. Abdurrahman's life work has survived, and unless his successor destroys it by mistakes of his own making, its enduring effects must be such as to make it worth while to recall briefly what that life work was. The great change which the late Ameer wrought during his twenty years' reign may be described roughly as the transformation of Afghanistan from a feudal into a despotically-centralised military state. Abdurrahman became in fact as well as in name the first Ameer of Afghanistan. Before him there were only Ameers of Kabul, and their position towards the great |