h'ang-na_ (Udyana)...." (Ed. Chavannes, _I-tsing_, p. 105.)--H. C.]

We must now turn to the name _Pashai_. The Pashai Tribe are now Mahomedan,
but are reckoned among the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, which
the Afghans are not. Baber mentions them several times, and counts their
language as one of the dozen that were spoken at Kabul in his time. Burnes
says it resembles that of the Kafirs. A small vocabulary of it was
published by Leech, in the seventh volume of the _J. A. S. B._, which I
have compared with vocabularies of Siah-posh Kafir, published by Raverty
in vol. xxxiii. of the same journal, and by Lumsden in his _Report of the
Mission to Kandahar_, in 1837. Both are Aryan, and seemingly of Professor
Max Mueller's class _Indic_, but not very close to one another.[1]

Ibn Batuta, after crossing the Hindu-Kush by one of the passes at the head
of the Panjshir Valley, reaches the Mountain BASHAI (Pashai). In the same
vicinity the Pashais are mentioned by Sidi 'Ali, in 1554. And it is still
in the neighbourhood of Panjshir that the tribe is most numerous, though
they have other settlements in the hill-country about Nijrao, and on the
left bank of the Kabul River between Kabul and Jalalabad. _Pasha_ and
_Pasha_-gar is also named as one of the chief divisions of the Kafirs, and
it seems a fair conjecture that it represents those of the Pashais who
resisted or escaped conversion to Islam. (See _Leech's Reports_ in
Collection pub. at Calcutta in 1839; _Baber_, 140; _Elphinstone_, I. 411;
_J. A. S. B._ VII. 329, 731, XXVIII. 317 seqq., XXXIII. 271-272; _I. B._
III. 86; _J. As._ IX. 203, and _J. R. A. S._ N.S. V. 103, 278.)

The route of which Marco had heard must almost certainly have been one of
those leading by the high Valley of Zebak, and by the Dorah or the Nuksan
Pass, over the watershed of Hindu-Kush into Chitral, and so to Dir, as
already noticed. The difficulty remains as to how he came to apply the
name _Pashai_ to the country south-east of Badakhshan. I cannot tell. But
it is at least possible that the name of the Pashai tribe (of which the
branches even now are spread over a considerable extent of country) may
have once had a wide application over the southern spurs of the Hindu-
Kush.[2] Our Author, moreover, is speaking here from hearsay, and hearsay
geography without maps is much given to generalising. I apprehend that,
along with characteristics specially referable to the Tibetan and Mongol
tradition