There are several points about this remarkable journey which might lead one to suspect that romance was not altogether a stranger to it, were it not that the route itself is described with surprising accuracy. It has only lately been possible to verify step by step the road described by Masson. He could hardly have carried about volumes of notes with him under such conditions as his story depicts, and it might very well have happened that he dislocated his topography or his ethnography from lapse of memory. But he does neither; and the most amazing feature of Masson's tales of travel is that in all essential features we knew little more about the country of the Afghans after the last war with Afghanistan than he could have told us before the first. Shall (or Quetta as we know it now) is described as a town of about 300 houses, surrounded by a slight crenelated wall. The "huge mound" (now the fort) is noted as supporting a ruinous citadel, the residence of the Governor. Fruit was plentiful then, and he adds that "Shall is proverbially celebrated for the excellence of its lambs." By the desolate plain of Dasht-i-bedoulat and the Bolan Pass, Masson trod the well-known route to Dadar and Shikarpur. He lived a strange life in those days. No one since his time has rubbed shoulders with Afghan and Baluch, intimately associating himself with all their simple and savage ways; reckoning every man he met on the road as a robber till he proved a friend; absolutely penniless, yet still meeting with rough hospitality and real kindness now and then, and ever absorbing with a most marvellous power of digestion all that was useful in the way of information, whether it concerned the red-hot sand-strewn plains, or the vermin-covered thieves and outcasts that disgraced them. It was quite as often with the lowest of the gang as with the leaders that he found himself most intimately associated.
In those days Sind was a country as unknown to us geographically as Afghanistan. The Indus and its capacity for navigation was a matter of supreme interest, but the deserts of Sind were eyed askance, and across those deserts came little call for exploration. The government of the country under the Sind Amirs was decrepit and loose, leaving district municipalities to look after themselves, and promoting no general scheme for the public good. Shikarpur had been a great centre of trade under the Duranis, and its financial credit extended far into Central Asia. But in Masson's time much of that credit had disappeared with the capitalists who supported it--chiefly Hindu bankers--who migrated to the cities of Multan and Amritsar as the Sikh power in the Punjab became a more and more powerful factor in frontier politics. Whether Masson is correct in his estimate of the mischief done by the reckless supply of funds from Shikarpur to the restless nobles of Afghanistan, who were thus enabled to set on foot raids and inroads into each other's territories, is, I think, doubtful. The want of money never stayed an Afghan raid--on the contrary it is more apt to instigate it. From Shikarpur he bent his steps towards the Punjab. No modern traveller, racing down the Indus valley by a north-western train, can well appreciate the amount of human interest and activity which lies hidden beyond the wide flat plains of tamarisk jungle that stretch between him and the frontier hills. This same Indus valley was Arabic India for centuries, and there were Greek settlements centuries earlier than the Arabs; none of this escaped Masson.