The course of the river on which the town is built, no less than the name of the lake into which that river falls and the description of the Turk slave girls (as of the cavalry), is quite inapplicable to anything to be found in modern Tibet. I have little doubt that the Tibet of Idrisi was a town on the high-road to China, which followed the Tarim River eastward to its bourne in Lake Burhan. Lake Burhan is now a swamp distinct from Lob, but 1000 years ago it may have been a part of the Lob system, and Bagnarghar a part of Mongolia. The description of the slave girls would apply equally well to the Turkman women or to the Kirghiz, but certainly not to the flat-featured, squat-shaped Tibetan, although there are not wanting good looks amongst them. Then follows, in Idrisi's account, a list of the dependencies of Tibet and some travellers' tales about the musk-deer. It is impossible to place the ancient town of Tibet accurately. There are ruined sites in numbers on the Tarim banks, and amongst them a place called Tippak, but it would be dangerous to assume a connection between Tibet and Tippak. This is interesting (and the interest must be the excuse for the digression from Afghanistan), because it indicates that modern Chinese Turkistan was included in Tibet a thousand years ago, and it further throws a certain amount of light on the origin of the remarkable concentration of Buddhist centres in the Takla Makan.
[6] Adraskand is mentioned as "a little place with cultivation, gardens, and plenty of sweet water," and as one of the four towns under the domination of Asfaran. This corresponds fairly well with the modern town of Kila Adraskand of the same name. On the same southern route from Herat, undoubtedly, was "Malin Herat, at one day's journey, a town surrounded by gardens." The picturesque ruins of the bridge called the Pul-i-Malun, across the Hari Rud, on the Kandahar road, is evidence of the former existence of a town of Malun, of which no trace remains to-day, but which must have corresponded very closely with Rozabagh.
[8] Now Colonel the Hon. M. G. Talbot, R.E.
[9] The name or term Bot is locally applied now to certain Himalayan districts as well as to Tibet.
Between Arabia and India is the strange land of Makran, in the southern defiles and deserts of which country Alexander lost his way. Had he by chance separated himself from the coast and abandoned connection with his fleet he might have passed through Makran by more northerly routes to Persia, and have made one of those open ways which Arab occupation opened up to traffic 1000 years later. Makran is not an attractive country for the modern explorer. It is not yet a popular field for enterprise in research (though it well may become so), and a few words of further description are necessary to explain how it was that the death-trap of Alexander proved to be the road to wealth and power of the subsequent Arab.