Crossing the Hindu Kush

Abstract

AFGHANISTAN has been aptly termed the gateway of India; for from this frontier has come nearly every successful invasion since the first Aryans conquered the country some thirty-five centuries ago. And yet this is not an easy road. The Hindu Kush rise in many places to more than 20,000 feet; and the passes are narrow, rocky defiles little suited to caravans, much less to armies. But all geography is relative. Difficult as the way of the Hindu Kush is, it is by far the easiest means of access to the rich and fertile plains of India. On the east the way is blocked by the soggy, feverridden jungles of Burma; to the south is the tempestuous Indian Ocean; on the west the arid wastes of Baluchistan discourage travel; on the north the towering Himalaya form an almost impassable barrier. Only to the northwest are the highways practicable, possessing the five essentials for caravan trade: water, forage, easy gradients, open valleys, and relatively low passes. For these reasons, until the opening of sea routes by Dutch and Portuguese adventurers in the sixteenth century, Afghanistan was the undisputed crossroads of Asia. Here all the traffic routes converged. The silk caravans journeying from China to the west skirted the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush, where they met those from India bound for the north, for China, or for Persia and the west.' Later the trade going from China to the west turned south across the mountains and followed the Indus Valley to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.2 As late as the nineteenth century much of the trade between India and China, and some of the commerce with the west, followed this overland path. The advent of steel ships propelled by steam and the construction of railroads in Russia, China, and India dealt a deathblow to the overland caravan routes. What may well have been the last camel train bearing Indian goods to China left Kabul in the spring of I934The result of so basic a change in world communications has been to lessen the political, strategic, and economic importance of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush. But now a further change in transportation modes has aroused hopes that a new trade may grow up to replace the old, at least in part. The railroad, which did so much to kill trade in this region, has resulted in the development of new areas. This is notably so in Russian Turkestan, thanks to the Turk-Sib railway. At the same time the invention of the motorcar and the development of the high-powered, heavy-duty American truck have given promise that a profitable trade may be maintained between India and Central