Proceed to Peshawar by Hill George;

Author:Hill, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Baluchistan, from the Bolan Pass to Quetta, and then north through Waziristan

One of the few American tourists who preceded these travelers was Lowell Thomas, in the summer of 1923. He was arguably the first and probably the only other American to have made the trip before Enders and Zimmermann. He made the trip in the opposite direction. I know of no others except Thomas who traveled in this area before AZ and Enders, and the area was of little interest after World War II. The trip is now completely off limits to Americans. Thomas came through the Bolan Pass to Quetta, and he then headed north through some of the same places that Enders and AZ visited, ending in Peshawar. Lowell Thomas regarded the Bolan Pass as “one of the strongest strategical positions in the world,” an eerily similar view to the expression that AZ voiced twenty years later regarding the Peiwar Kotal, not far north of the Bolan, that he observed was the “most potentially powerfully position in world.”49

Lowell Thomas traveled through Quetta and the Khyber Pass about nine decades ago, just over two decades before AZ and Enders made their trip. Thomas knew the tribesmen were unpredictable and dangerous, and he was fortunate to get through his trip unscathed—and so were AZ and Enders. Thomas recalled Kipling’s poetic warning to a mortally wounded soldier. Kipling said he should commit suicide, rather than risk captivity and torture: “Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains. An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”50 Thomas continued,

[W]e crossed the Sind desert by train and ascended the mountains by way of the Bolan Pass to Quetta, . . . one of the strongest strategical positions in the world. . . . From Quetta we passed through the Pink Mountains of Baluchistan . . . north to Waziristan. To reach this barren, inhospitable country after leaving the railway, you must cross the Indus River . . . near the city of Dera Ismail Khan. . . . From Tank we motor on . . . and get to our next camp before dark; men have been killed along almost every yard of this road to Jandola, and a breakdown at this hour would not be at all healthful. [We] hear, during the small hours, the occasional plonk of a sniper’s bullet. . . . From Southern Waziristan, the land of the intractable Mahsuds [a tribe of the NWFP], we motor north . . . around Bannu, the Waziri metropolis, where the land is irrigated by the Kurram River. . . . Seventy miles northeast of Bannu, we ascend into the mountains to Kohat, one of the most notorious cities of the Afghan frontier. . . . Not long after we passed through the town, Afridi outlaws crept steadily into the bungalow of Major A. J. Ellis, during that officer’s absence, murdered his wife and then carried off his beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter without even arousing the guards who were but a few yards away.

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