four miles north of a point of the Heri-rúd, where that river is spanned by a bridge with twenty-six arches. It is about 420 miles to the west of the Afghán capital, Kábul, about 200 south-east of Meshed, and 202 miles south-east by south of Sarakhs. It forms a kind of irregular parallelogram surrounded by a thick mud wall from twelve to eighteen feet high, backed by a brick wall ten feet high and provided with thirty towers and five wellfortified gates. Herát has greatly fallen from the high position it held when it was described as the Pearl of the World. The ruins in its vicinity testify to its former greatness. From that position it fell, partly perhaps in consequence of the rivalry of Meshed, supported by the wealth and influence of Persia, but mainly because of the constant wars and the long-continued oppression which in the course of a hundred and fifty years have caused the decrease of the population from a hundred thousand to a little more than one third of that number. Herát, however, the capital of the fertile oasis which covers the approaches to India, the centre point for the caravan routes of Central Asia, must ere long resume her lost position. Again will she become, whether under English auspices or under the auspices of Russia, the granary and garden of Central Asia. The crucial moment has now arrived to decide whether her splendid resources will be used for the invasion of India by Russia, or for the defence of India against that aggressive power.

A glance at the past history of Herát with be sufficient to prove the vital importance of this question. The Mogol rulers who preceded the British in the occupation of India always recognised the necessity of guarding in their own

*

"Khorásán is the oyster-shell of the world, and Herát is its Pearl."-Eastern Proverb.

hands the key of that portal. When in the decay of their empire they lost that key, two invasions from the north. speedily followed. The invaders destroyed and retired, but the destruction they effected so weakened the Mogol dynasty that it fell an easy prey to the first invader from beyond the seas.

In the time of Báber indeed

But it was not the Mogols alone who recognized the importance of Herát as the outlying bulwark of India. With one solitary exception, that of Báber—to be presently noticed- every invader from the north has deemed the conquest of Herát as the first necessary preliminary to an attack upon India. So thought Alexander the Great (327 B.C.); so thought Chengiz Khán (I2I9-22 A.D.); so thought Taimur (1381 A.D.). Herát was the shuttlecock between the Persians and the Uzbeks, and Báber, who possessed Kábul, solved the question whilst they were fighting by cutting into the Herát line at Kandahar (1525-26 A.D.). At a later period, 1731, the conqueror of Persia, the Khorasáni Nadir Sháh, did not dare to dream even of the conquest of India until he had conquered both Herát and Kandahar. He did not grudge the four months which he found necessary to take the first, nor the thirteen required to subdue the opposition of the second. His successor in the career of conquest, Ahmad Sháh, a Durani Afghán, followed the same lines (1747-61); and, by his success, crushed the vitality out of the ruling dynasty of India. An Afghán, cherishing the snow-clad hills of his native country, he conquered, plundered, and retired. Under similiar circumstances, a European invader, who to gain a similar result should have traversed sandy deserts and crossed rocky steppes, would conquer-and remain !

The conquest of Délhi by Ahmad Shah, May 1757; his

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second occupation of the Imperial city the year following and the crowning victory of Pánipat (January 1761) dealt the reigning dynasty of India a blow under which it reeled and from which it never recovered. The very same year which saw the first conquest of Dihli witnessed likewise, on the plain of Plassey, a victory which planted the British firmly in Bengal. Whilst Ahmad Shah retired, satiated with slaughter and with plunder, the British remained and pushed forward. The edifice of Mogol dominion was rotten to the core. It fell, less from the efforts of the British than from the decay which had sapped its foundations. Until 1857-8 India had never, in the true sense of the term, been conquered by the British. The natives of India who preferred the rule of law to the rule of anarchy and spoliation, had fought under the British banner for the principles which secured to them the possession of their own lands, the safety of their wives and children. Fighting on these lines,-the fight almost invariably forced upon them--the British advanced steadily till they reached the frontier line of the Sutlej. The country beyond that frontier line, the country of the Five Rivers, the Panjáb, was ruled at the time by one of the most astute sovereigns who has ever sat upon an eastern throne. But in 1836-7 Ranjit Singh was growing old. In the mountainous country beyond his northern frontier Dost Muhammad, a young ruler of the Baruckzye clan of the Duráni tribe, was rising into notice in the eastern world. Herát, which had not been heard of since Ahmad Sháh had sacked it, on the death of Nadir Sháh, in 1749, but which during the long period had been declining under the misrule and oppression of its foreign masters, came once more to be talked about. A Persian army, it was rumoured throughout the bazaars of India and Central Asia, was marching against

the capital of the fertile country watered by the Heri-rúd, and with that army, controlling its movements and instructing its soldiers, marched likewise many Russian officers and some hundreds of Russian soldiers. The rumour spreading onwards reached the Governor-General of India in Calcutta it was passed on to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs in London. That minister recognized at a glance all its significance, all its importance. The name of that minister was Lord Palmerston! >

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST CONNECTION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND HERÁT.

THE keen vision of Lord Palmerston had detected, I have said, at a glance, all the significance, all the importance of the news that a Persian army, guided and controlled by Russian officers, was marching on Herát; he had recognized that, should that march be successful, Herát would become a Persian Herát controlled by Russia. The armed intrigue must be met and baffled at all hazards. >

The issues which were so quickly discerned by Lord Palmerston in London were not, unfortunately, so clear to the vision of the Governor-General of India and his Council. The most obvious method to accomplish the desired end would have been to lend efficient support to the ruler of Afghánistán. It was certain that Dost Muhammad desired as little as Lord Palmerston the occupation of the second city of his dominions by a RussoPersian army.

That there existed difficulties in the way of a course so pointed is true. The greatest of these difficulties lay in the fact that whilst Dost Muhammad exercised supreme authority in Kábulistán, or easterm Afghánistán, his influence in Kandahar and Herát was little more than nominal. In the former his brothers held sway, and his brothers, jealous of his authority, were very much disposed to accept the Shah of Persia as their suzerain: they had even made advances to Russia. >