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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[NOVEMBER, 1917
Wall” in the desert and the Limes lines by which Imperial Rome guarded its marches in Syria and elsewhere in the Near East against barbarjan inroads? Only from future researches can we hope for a safe answer.
From these desert surveys I returned to the inhabited portion of Persian Seistan by the beginning of January, 1916, and was kept busy during a few weeks with the examination of the numerous ruins surviving there. Almost all proved of mediæval Muhammadan origin or even more recent, a fact which the physical conditions of the present Helmand delta easily account for. At two sites, however, which their high level has protected from the effects of irrigation of periodic inundation, I discovered definite archæological evidence of ancient occupation. At the large ruined stronghold known as Shahristan, occupying a high alluvial terrace, this included pottery fragments inscribed in early Aramaic characters.
I should have much liked to visit the Afghan portion of Seistan, to the north of the Helmand, where Sir Henry McMahon's Mission and earlier travellers had found a large number of ruins still awaiting expert examination. Permission for such a visit could, however, not be secured, and I did not feel altogether surprised at it. So, after collecting useful anthropometric materials which help to illustrate the curious mixture of rac s in the population of Seistan, I returned to the desert south and supplemented my survey of the ancient Limes by some rapid excavations. They disclosed interesting details as to the construction and internal arrangements of those ruined watch-stations and the life once led there.
Thence I set out by the beginning of last February for the return journey to India, whither most of my archæological finds from Seistan, filling twelve cases, had already preceded me. I travelled by the Seistan-Nushki trade route, which the zeal of Captain (now Colonel) F. Webb Ware, of the Indian Political Department, had first pioneered through the desert some twenty years ago. Well known as the route is, this desert journey of close on 500 miles through the wastes of Baluchistan had for me a special interest. I could not have wished for a better modern illustration of the conditions once prevailing on that ancient route through the Lop desert, which the Chinese had opened about 110 B.C. for the expansion of their trade and political influence westwards, and which two years before I succeeded in tracking through those waterless wastes after sixteen centuries of abandonment.
It is true that wells of tolerably good water at most of the stages, comfortable resthouses at all, and good camel grazing to be found at half a dozen points, made progress along this modern desert track seem child's play compared with what we had gone through. Even in ancient times the physical difficulties successfully overcome by those early Chinese pioneers must have been vastly greater than those which the route to Seistan ever presented in the days before its improvements. And yet the latter, by the political reasons which have necessitated its opening, by its purpose, by the character of the traffic I found moving along it, provided a most striking analogy, and neither as a geographer nor as a historical student could I fail to appreciate its significance.
By February 21 I reached Nushki, whence the railway carried me to Delhi. During my week's stay at the Indian capital I received fresh proof of the kind personal interest with which His Excellency the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, had from the start followed and encouraged my enterprise. There, too, I was able to meet again some of my oldest friends in India, to whom I had never appealed in vain for such Official support as they could give to my scientific labours. A subsequent brief visit to Dehra Dun, the Survey of India headquarters, enabled me to arrange for the suitable publications of the topographical results brought back from this journey, in an atlas of maps. At the same time I secured the admission of
