ards, the narrow enclosed valleys widening out towards
the sources of the rivers, where ages of denudation have worn down the
folds and filled up the hollows with fruitful soil, until at last they
touch the central water-divide, the key of the whole system, on the Quetta
plateau. Thus the upper parts of the Zhob valley are comparatively open and
fertile, with flourishing villages, and a cultivation which has been
greatly developed under British rule, and are bounded by long, sweeping,
gentle spurs clothed with wild olive woods containing trees of immense
size. The lower reaches of the Zhob and Kundar are hemmed in by rugged
limestone walls, serrated and banded with deep clefts and gorges, a
wilderness of stony desolation. Looking eastwards from the Kaisargarh, one
can again count the backs of innumerable minor ridges, smaller wrinkles or
folds formed during a process of upheaval of the Suliman Mountains, at the
close of a great volcanic epoch which has hardly yet ceased to give
evidence of its existence. On the outside edge, facing the Indus plains, is
a more strictly regular, but higher and more rugged, ridge of hills which
marks the Siwaliks. The Baluch Siwaliks afford us strange glimpses into a
recent geological past, when the same gigantic mammals roamed along the
foot of these wild hills as once inhabited the tangled forests below the
Himalaya. Between the Takht Mountain and the Siwaliks, the intervening belt
of ridge and furrow has been greatly denuded by transverse drainage--a
system of drainage which we now know to have existed before the formation
of the hills, and to have continued to cut through them as they gradually
rose above the plain level. Where this intervening band is not covered by
recent gravel deposits, it exhibits beds of limestone, clays and sandstone
with fossils, which, in age, range from the Lower Eocene to the Miocene.
Beyond the Siwaliks, still looking eastwards, are the sand waves of the
Indus plain; a yellow sea broken here and there with the shadow of village
orchards and the sheen of cultivation, extending to the long black sinuous
line which denotes the fringe of trees bordering the Indus. Such is the
scene which Solomon is said to have invited his Indian bride to gaze upon
for the last time, as they rested on the crags of the southern buttress of
the Takht--where his shrine exists to this day. To that shrine thousands of
pilgrims, Mahommedans and Hindus alike, resort on their yearly pilgri