Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/553

Rh ousies of commercial companies, and instead of desultory wars between rival settlements or against native princes, we have the greatest military powers of the world – Russia, France, and England – feeling their way toward each other across wide deserts, difficult mountain ranges, and the debatable lands that skirt the Oxus in the north or the Mekong River on the far southeast of the Anglo-Indian Empire.

A SACRED POOL AT TIRUPARANKUNDRAM NEAR MADURA.

To those, indeed, who demand permanency for territorial borders in Asia, it may have been instructive to follow, throughout the events and transactions rapidly sketched in the foregoing pages, the adventures of successive Anglo-Indian governments in search of a stable and scientifically defensible land frontier. The English have usually begun by projecting a political