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Updated: June 9, 2025
The friendship of the Ameer was now a matter of vital concern; and yet, as we have seen, Lord Northbrook alienated him, firstly by giving an unfavourable verdict in regard to the Persian boundary in the district of Seistan, and still more so by refusing to grant the long-wished-for guarantee of his dynasty. The year 1873 marks a fatal turning-point in Anglo-Afghan relations.
Several of these have been already described in these volumes. Of the remainder the most important were the Lake of Van, the Touz-Ghieul, the great lake of Seistan, and Lake Moeris. These cannot be dismissed without a brief description. Lake Van is situated at a very unusual elevation, being more than 5400 feet above the sea level.
That this was so was frankly admitted by Mr Ellis, the British envoy to his Court, who wrote to his Government that the Shah had fair claim to the sovereignty of Afghanistan as far as Ghuznee, and that Kamran's conduct in occupying part of the Persian province of Seistan had given the Shah 'a full justification for commencing hostilities against Herat.
In order to reduce the people living here he despatched a part of his host by a northerly route through Seistan to north Persia. He himself led forty thousand men along the coast. Twelve thousand men were to sail and row the newly-built ships along the coast of the Arabian Sea, through the Straits of Hormuz, and along the northern coast of the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Euphrates.
They found a vent for their superabundant population in Seistan, Afghanistan, and India, and ceased to have any hopes of making an impression on the Arsacid kingdom. Mithridates, it is probable, even took territory from them.
The first efforts of the new monarch were of necessity directed towards an arrangement with the Ephthalites, whose signal victory over Perozes had laid the north-eastern frontier of Persia open to their attack. Balas, we are told, employed on this service the arms and arts of an officer named Sukhra or Sufraii, who was at the time governor of Seistan.
The deep sand and burning heat of the dreadful Lut Desert intervenes between me and the Mekran coast; the route through Beloochistan, barely passable with camels and guides and skins of water in the winter, is not only impracticable for anything in the summer, but there is the additional obstacle of the spring floods of the Helmund and the Seistan Lake.
To the south of this, in Southern Afghanistan, the Suleiman range, of an average height of 9,000 feet, falls rapidly toward the valley of the Indus. The Helmund terminates in the swamps of Seistan, as also do the Kash, Farrah, and Herat rivers, running parallel to the Helmund across the Kandahar-Herat roads, at 80, 150, and 200 miles, respectively, to the west of it.
My attention is at once arrested by the English coat-of-arms on his sword-belt; both belt and clasp have evidently wandered from the ranks of the British army. "Pollock Sahib," he says, in reply to my inquiries it is a relic of the Seistan Boundary Commission.
It was natural that, after the conquest of Seistan by Varahran II., about A.D. 280, the Persian monarchs should establish relations with the chieftains ruling in Afghanistan. That country seems, from the first to the fourth century of our era, to have been under the government of princes of Scythian descent and of considerable wealth and power. Kadphises, Kanerki, Kenorano.
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