Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/99

1885.] == AN EXCURSION TO SOLOMON'S THRONE. == Dera Ismail Khán, Sept. 27, 1884.

noon on November 27th last, a small party of British officers reached the highest peak of the Suliman range, and after standing a few minutes on it, all but one descended to their bivouac. The one who remained was a surveyor, a major in the Royal Engineers, well known throughout India for the truth, finish, and beauty of his water-colour paintings from nature. He opened a large white umbrella, and from beneath its shade "shot" with his theodolite various near and distant points, and then, when too benumbed for further work, rejoined his companions. To place that surveyor for two hours on the Takht-i-Suliman – the Solomon's Throne of our school geographies – 1700 troops, with the necossary complement of camp-followers, mules, and camel-transport, had been marching for the previous twelve days; had stormed a position which, better defended, might have been impregnable; had killed some fifteen to twenty brave mountaineers; and had, by the time the force returned to cantonments, cost the Government of India about half a lakh of rupees.

I propose to describe in this paper how the expedition came to be sanctioned, and how it was carried out.

Upon the annexation of the Punjab in 1849, the boundary of British India was advanced westwards to the very foot of the mountains of Afghanistan and Bilochistan. In order to minimise the risk of "complications" – that word of ill omen to over-cautious Governments – it was ordered that no officer should cross the border on any pretext whatsoever. But that circumstances have occasionally proved too strong for this stay-at-home policy, and that punitory raids and expeditions into the hills have sometimes been forced upon us, we should be to-day as ignorant of the topography and political geography of the mountainous regions immediately beyond our border as we were thirty-six years ago, when "the force of circumstances," or, as Russia calls it, respecting her own advance towards India, "imperious necessity," made the Punjab of Ranjeet Singh a British province. What is termed "the close border system" has kept our troops locked up in their frontier cantonments and outposts all the year round, has frequently led independent hill-tribes to believe that we were afraid of them, and has more than once conduced to mistakes and even disasters.

Two instances by way of illustration will suffice. In 1868, at what is known as the Uhlan Pass affair, a portion of the Kohat garrison stormed a stone breastwork upon a hill-top only four miles from cantonments, and suffered a repulse with the loss of thirty-seven officers and men killed and wounded. When the attack was ordered, cavalry were sent round the hill to cut off the retreat of the defenders as they streamed across the plain. After the repulse had been suffered, it was