Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/281

Rh have been the country of the upper Missouri; but this plain between the Indus and the Safed Koh has been a world's battle-ground for more than two thousand years, and history is written on top of history like records on a palimpsest. Here at the Indus has always been the virtual frontier of India, the river drawing a natural line from the Himalayas down to the Persian Gulf; but, once advancing here to a valley and there to a range, the frontier has crept westward and northward, and is still ever-moving, changing, and elusive.

At Khairabad station, facing Attock, the early morning tea-table was ready on the platform, and muffled figures bore trays of steaming cups to the car windows, while benumbed travelers surrounded the tall samovar. The wildest lot of turbaned and disheveled folk, some in sheepskin coats and some wound over and looped up with unmanageable yards and yards of loose cotton clothing and loaded down with strange saddle-bags, bundles, water-jars, and hubble-bubble pipes, were already waiting when the train drew up. When the third-class passengers, who had been packed to standing-room all night, were bundled out and added to this waiting crowd while a fresh train was made up, there was spectacle indeed, local color too, and such an uproar as threatened the demolition of the Indian Empire—or at least the sacking of the train and the razing of Khairabad station. The whole traveling public had changed overnight to the fierce Afghan type, which had been so picturesque when first seen in the bazaars of Lahore; and the vehement giants, tur-