Pcshawur and the Khyber Pass 4 1 



Mir must be one of the worst. To begin with, the 

 climate, cold in winter, cold enough for a log fire and 

 fur coats, becomes unbearably hot by the last week in 

 March, and develops into an oven later on. 



As for the place itself, coming out to India and 

 expecting to see palms and cocoanut-trees, jungles and 

 tropical vegetation, I found flat, brown plains, broken 

 in parts by cultivation or by dried-up, stunted bushes, 

 roads buried in thick white dust, and overhead a sun 

 which scorched and glared from morning to night 

 in a sky which never possessed a cloud upon its brazen 

 face. The lines stretch some distance in Mian Mir 

 white, dazzling buildings ; brown flats of earth baked 

 like bricks reaching up to the walls and forming the 

 Tommies' " play-ground/' Besides the lines was the 

 hospital, also the dusty, grassless polo-ground, and the 

 little club, the garden of which was kept well watered. 

 Officers' bungalows on either side of roads which 

 were ruled across the station and shaded by that dusty 

 and tired-looking tree the tamarisk, completed Mian 

 Mir. The church, as I have said, is the feature of a 

 place which has nothing in it or round it to please 

 the eye, except flat, endless monotony, dust and heat. 

 The very bungalows themselves looked as though they 

 might have been built yesterday, the debris of building 

 hardly yet removed from the bare, brown compound, 

 edged by a mud wall and innocent of any suspicion 

 of green. 



Nothing will grow without copious waterings, and 

 as the life of a soldier is one of many moves, few people 



