One would have thought that after so extensive an exploration, filled, as it was, with daily risk from the hostility of fanatics, or the more common (in those days) assaults of robbers, Masson would have had enough of adventure to last him some years. It was not so. He appears to have been an irreclaimable nomadic vagabond, and his only thought, now that he had reached the West, was to be off again to Afghanistan. Kalat again was his first objective, and to reach that place he followed very much the same route as before. From Kalat, however, to Kandahar and Kabul, he opened up a new line which is worth description. There is little to record as far as Kalat. Once again he joined a mixed Afghan khafila returning from India, and followed the route which leads through Las Bela, Wad, and Khozdar. It was spring, and the country was bright with flowers, the narrow little valleys being full of the brilliance of upspringing crops. It is a mistake to regard Baluchistan as a waste corner of Asia, the dumping ground of the rubbish left over from the world's creation. Much of it, doubtless, is inexpressibly dreary, and in certain dry and sun-baked plains scarred with leprous streaks of salt eruption, it is occasionally difficult to realize the beauty of the spring and summer time in valleys where water is still fairly abundant, and the green things of the earth seem mostly to congregate. A bed of scarlet tulips, or the yellow sheen of the flowering shrub which spreads across the plain of Wad would make any landscape gay, and the long jagged lines of purple hills with chequered shadows patching their rugged spurs would be a fascinating background to any picture. "Only man is vile,"--but this is not true either.
The character of the mixed inhabitants of these valleys of Eastern Baluchistan (we have no room for ethnological disquisitions) is as rugged as their hills, and as varied with patches of brightness as their plains. Masson knew them as no one knows them now, and he evidently loved them. His life was never safe from day to day, but that did not prevent much good comradeship, some genuine friendship, and a shrewd appreciation of the straight uprightness of those who, like the patriarchs and prophets of old, seemed to be the righteous few who leaven the whole lump. Masson was not a missionary, he was only a well-educated and most observant vagabond, but what he has to say of Baluch (or Brahui) character is just what Sandeman said half a century later, and what Barnes or MacMahon[11] would say to-day.