11 



a. — Physical Geography and geology. 



It is as well to mention here that the Trans-Indus salt field or 

 region under notice, does not include the salt seen 

 in the Liin (Loon) Nallah northwards from Kala- 

 bagh, on the same western or right bank of the river. This Liin Nallah 

 salt has, notwithstanding the enormously broken and disconnected state 

 of the immediately adjacent rocks, a much more intimate connexion with 

 the Cis-Indus salt series, of which it appears to be the natural continua- 

 tion, than it has with the rock-salt lying at the nearest point some twenty 

 miles to the northward. Lithologically the salt of the two regions 

 differs both in colour and texture as well as in general aspect. Nor is 

 the association of adjacent rocks the same. At Kalabagh, displaced 

 tertiary sandstones lie on one side of the salt, palaeozoic and secondary 

 limestones, &c, on the other, these latter beds never being seen in con- 

 nexion with the numerous rock exposures occupying the large Kohat, or 

 Khattak, salt region. 



Excluding this (Liin) Nallah salt near Kalabagh, the area occupied 

 by the Trans-Indus salt region is included within about a thousand 

 square miles of country, extending from the British Frontier eastward to 

 near the river Indus, and lying between Kohat and Bannii, but nearer 

 to the latter station, which is about eighteen miles distant in a south- 

 westerly direction from the most southerly and westerly salt exposure at 

 Siirdag Pass. 



Boundaries. — The natural boundaries of the salt-bearing country 

 appear to be the Kiiram (Koorum) river on the west and the Indus on the 

 east ; its political limits are, however, different, the ' red line/ supposed 

 to indicate the British Frontier, excluding a large group of the Waziri 

 hills Cis-Kuram crowned by the mural rocks and pinnacles of Kaffir Kot. 



British influence appears to be felt in the valleys wherever the land 

 is at all fit for cultivation, but the hill ranges, far within the British 

 Protectorate in the dominions of Sir Khwajah Mahomed Khan, are yearly 



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