mobility. Railhead at Chaman, less than ninety miles away, is within four days' march of Kandahar, with no difficulties of water, and the desert for protection southward nearly all the way. In that direction, beyond Chaman and the Khojak, we cannot and do not need to go. But our position on the extreme flank might be immensely strengthened with no violation of territory and without any very considerable expense. The railway at present ends at Nushki, ninety-one miles on the trade route to Sistan: very well as far as it goes, but not going far enough to form an effective base for offensive operations, seeing that any advance must follow the trade route westward for a hundred and five miles before striking north for the waters of the Helmand. There are no engineering difficulties to be considered in carrying the railhead by this route four marches forward to Yadgar Char, and very few to be overcome in taking it thence the seventy-four miles north-westward to Barup Char, which would bring it to the border and within seventy miles of the Helmand at Khwaja Ali. Barup Char would make a magnificent station, a sanatorium almost, placed as it is on a lofty plateau, admirably supplied with water, as its name, "the place of the breaking forth of wells," implies, and strategically of a value it is difficult to overestimate, with the river beneath it, Sistan at its mercy, and the most inhospitable country for a

defence to the south. Here we should unquestionably be if the policy outlined above be accepted. No haste thereto is needed, and so far as the trade route is followed the advance of the railway should need no excuse. But some definite determination of policy is seriously of moment before the very strength of Quetta becomes a menace to Hindustan.

CHAPTER XXX

THE PRINCESS

THE Occasions in men's lives of which one can say determinedly, "This cannot happen thus again for a whole generation," are so few and can touch so few of us even when they do happen, that one may be pardoned for taking any such too seriously of which, when it occurs, fate chances to make us interested spectators. Yet for that pardon one felt there was no need to ask when watching the great ship which had hung for five months about the shores of India slip her moorings to them for the last time, and steal down the long harbour from Kiamari toward the open sea. She had come to India in the hot still haze of a November morning, wrapt in the smoke of guns; she left it at the close of day, under the sunset's glories, cleaving a wind that spread out her splendid flags against the emblazoned cirrus of the sky, and swept after her, like some wild flight of birds, the white and amber wings of a great fleet of fishing-boats, which had set sail to fling to her, across the blue water, their last farewells.

The Prince was leaving, never, probably, to return; the war-ship that bore him, with years briefer even than those of a man, was still less likely again to make acquaintance with these unfamiliar seas. Looking thirty years ahead, one could dimly wonder what strange shape of ship would bring the next English Prince who came to show himself to his Eastern subjects, and to what new people would he be brought, a people fecund with aspirations which are to-day but in their green beginnings, vigorous with determinations which are as yet but dreams.

There are those in India who seek excuse for their own inertia by speaking of the immobility of the East: but however that epithet may have been justified of the past, the man who now uses it must live blind to the significance of what is nearest to him.

At home, where our modes of locomotion, of sanitation, of education and of government are in a continual flux, we may indeed talk of immobility, for even where, in any serious conception of life, changes may be noticed, we refer them complacently, and in most cases with reason, to the swing of the pendulum.

The spirit which is stirring the East owes, however, none of its energy to the impetus of recoil; its dynamics are of another order: and, though drawing its origin and in some respect its character from the West, its final development