Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/452

 400 COMPLETION OF DOMINION in front of us were only Ran jit Singh, ruling the Pan- jab up to the Afghan hills, and the Sind Amirs in the Indus valley. The curtain was just rising upon the first act of the long drama of Central Asian politics, THE RELIEF OF LUCKNOW BY SIR HENRY HAVELOCK. not yet ended in our own time. What did this new departure imply? Not that we had any quarrel with the Afghans, from whom we were separated by the five rivers whose floods unite in the Indus. It meant that, after half a century's respite, the English be- lieved themselves to be again in danger of contact with