In the days before the Mahomedan conquest, the pilgrim days of devout Chinese searchers after truth, the footsteps of the Buddhist devotees can be very plainly traced. Balkh was a specially sacred centre; and the magnificence of the Bamian relics are also celebrated. We should not have known precisely the route followed by the pilgrims had they not left their traces half-way between Balkh and Bamian at Haibak. Here in the heart of this stony and rugged wilderness is an open cultivated plain, green with summer crops and streaked with the dark lines of orchard foliage. Little white houses peep out from amongst the greenery, and there is a kind of Swiss summer holiday air encompassing this mountain oasis which must have enchanted the votaries of Buddha in their time. The Buddhist architects of old were unsurpassed, even by the Roman Catholic Monks of later ages in the selection of sites for their monasteries and temples. The sweet seductions which Nature has to offer in her mountain retreats were as a thanksgiving to the pilgrim, weary footed and sore with the terrible experiences of travel which was far rougher than anything which even the most devoted Hajji can place to the credit of his account with the recording angel of the present day, and they were appreciated accordingly. Haibak, although not quite on the straight line to Bamian, was not to be overlooked as a resting-place, and here one of the quaintest of all these northern religious relics was literally unearthed by Captain Talbot[8] during the progress of the Russo-Afghan surveys. A small circular stupa was discovered cut out of solid rock below the ground level. It was surrounded by a ditch, and crowned by a small square-built chamber which was also cut out of the rock _in situ_. There was nothing to indicate the origin or meaning of a stupa in such a position, and time was wanting for anything more than a superficial examination; but here we had the evidence of Buddhist occupation and Buddhist worship forming a distinct link between Balkh and Bamian, and marking one resting-place for the weary pilgrim. As for caves, the country round Haibak appears to be studded with them.
So long must this strange region of ditch-like valleys, carved out of the wrinkled central highlands of Afghanistan, have existed as the focus of devout pilgrimage, if not of commercial activity, under the Bamian kings, that the absence of any record descriptive of the routes across it is rather surprising. Above the surface of the plateau the long grey folds of the hills follow each other in monotonous succession, with little relief from vegetation and unmarked by forest growth. It is generally a scene of weary, stony desolation through which narrow, white worn tracks thread their way. In the valleys it is different. Cut squarely out of the plateau these intersecting valleys, cliff bound on either side with reddish walls such as border the valley of Bamian, offer fair opportunity for colonization. Where the valleys open out there is space enough for cultivation, which in early summer makes pretty contrast with the ruddy hills that hedge it. Where it spreads out from the mouth of the gorges nourished by hundreds of small channels which carry the water far afield, it is in most charming contrast to the gaunt ruggedness of the hills from whence it emerges. Such is the general outlook from the Firozkohi plateau, looking northward into the Oxus plains when the yellow dust haze, driven southward by the north-western winds, lifts sufficiently from athwart the plains to render it possible to see towards Maimana or into the valley of Astarab.