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What Herodotus and the Greeks referred to as Ethiopia was, in fact, the kingdom of Kush. It was located up the Nile from Egypt. As the Egyptian empire grew in strength and wealth, it strove to expand its power over its neighbors. Egypt sent several military expeditions south along the Nile to try to conquer the black people of Kush.
He pictured the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, describing the everlasting snows where you look up and up at the sheer rocks and glaciers; "you feel like a baby tortoise away down there, so small, as like as not you get giddy and drunk-like." One night Hawk told me of a Hindu fakir who sat by the roadside performing the mango-trick for one anna. I illustrated it in the sand as he told it.
But they were on the march again betimes, next morning, breasting the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush, which at this point can be crossed without much difficulty. Before noon they were over the crest; and Lenox, weary at last of his nightmare struggle with the mountains, dropped thankfully into the Yarkhun valley, beyond which towered his last great obstacle the Darkót Pass.
Russia had advanced steadily from the Ural and the Caspian to the Hindu Kush and the Northern Pacific without once encountering serious resistance. Not once had she been called on to make a great national effort, and the armed resistance of the native races had never inflicted on her anything worse than pin-pricks.
Not until the sixteenth century, after almost a thousand years of pressure, did Islam gain supremacy in western Sudan. Ethiopia, shortly after defeating Kush, also became Christianized, and survived as a African only Christian island in a Moslem sea.
Both mulatto Pharaohs, Aahmes and Amenhotep I, sent expeditions into Ethiopia, and in the latter's day sons of the reigning Pharaoh began to assume the title of "Royal Son of Kush" in some such way as the son of the King of England becomes the Prince of Wales. Trade relations were renewed with Punt under circumstances which lead us to place that land in the region of the African lakes.
West of Kafirstan across the Hindoo Kush are, as we have said, passes innumerable, but only three which need be regarded as practicable for an advancing force, all the others more or less converging into these three. The Khak leads from Kunduz via Ghori and the valley of the Indarab to the head of the Panjshir valley. Its elevation is about thirteen thousand feet.
They were a very handsome race, at least the men; the women were too florid and buxom for my taste." "And this Lewis is he the only one of the family?" "The very last, and of course he does his best to make away with himself by risking his precious life in Hindu Kush or Tibet or somewhere." Her ladyship was geographically vague.
The rich and highly cultivated valley which they inhabit forms a grand highway into Kohistan and Koh Dahman; but all this land of terraced vineyards and orchards, watered by snow-cold streams from the picturesque gorges and mountain passes of the Hindoo Kush and Paghman mountains, this very garden of Afghanistan, stretching away southwards to the gates of Kabul, is peopled by the same fierce and turbulent race who have ever given the best fighting men to the armies of the Amirs, and who have rendered the position of Kabul as the ruling capital of Afghanistan a matter of necessity; with their instincts of religious hostility, it will probably be found that the Kohistani, rather than the Hindoo Kush, is the real barrier between the north and the south.
It is garrisoned by the British, and can boast of fair trade and a population of about fifty thousand. It is the centre of a fruitful district containing more than one million inhabitants. The fruitful valley and pass of Bamian lie on the road leading from Kabul to Turkestan. The pass, at an elevation of 8,496 feet, is the only known defile over the Hindu Kush practicable for artillery.
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