_ has been dealt with by Yule and Pauthier, and we know that it is
"the mountain tract at the head of the western branch of the Panjkora
River, through which leads the most frequented route from Peshawar and the
lower Swat valley to Chitral" (Stein, l.c.). Now with regard to the
situation of _Pashai_ (p. 104):

"It is clear that a safe identification of the territory intended cannot
be based upon such characteristics of its people as Marco Polo's account
here notes obviously from hearsay, but must reckon in the first place with
the plainly stated bearing and distance. And Sir Henry Yule's difficulty
arose just from the fact that what the information accessible to him
seemed to show about the location of the name _Pashai_ could not be
satisfactorily reconciled with those plain topographical data. Marco's
great commentator, thoroughly familiar as he was with whatever was known
in his time about the geography of the western Hindukush and the regions
between Oxus and Indus, could not fail to recognize the obvious connection
between our _Pashai_ and the tribal name _Pashai_ borne by Muhammanized
Kafirs who are repeatedly mentioned in mediaeval and modern accounts of
Kabul territory. But all these accounts seemed to place the Pashais in the
vicinity of the great Panjshir valley, north-east of Kabul, through which
passes one of the best-known routes from the Afghan capital to the
Hindukush watershed and thence to the Middle Oxus. Panjshir, like Kabul
itself, lies to the _south-west_ of Badakshan, and it is just this
discrepancy of bearing together with one in the distance reckoned to
Kashmir which caused Sir Henry Yule to give expression to doubts when
summing up his views about Nogodar's route."

From Sir George Grierson's _Linguistic Survey of India_ we learn that to
the south of the range of the Hindukush "the languages spoken from Kashmir
in the east to Kafiristan in the west are neither of Indian nor of Iranian
origin, but form a third branch of the Aryan stock of the great
Indo-European language family. Among the languages of this branch, now
rightly designated as 'Dardic,' the Kafir group holds a very prominent
place. In the Kafir group again we find the _Pashai_ language spoken over a
very considerable area. The map accompanying Sir George Grierson's
monograph on 'The Pisaca Languages of North-Western India' [Asiatic Society
Monographs, VIII., 1906], shows _Pashai_ as the language spoken along the
right bank of the Kun