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 missions and a strange "plague cordon" began mysteriously to break up the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.

In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized, Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the question. The Government of India's only road to Teheran was the 800-mile highroad via Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.

The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in Persia by Russia's projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean. The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the Ottoman Caliph and the Em