On all sides the
landscape is wild and rugged. Ridge succeeds ridge. Valley opens into
valley. As far as the eye can reach in every direction are ragged peaks
and spurs. The country of the plains is left, and we have entered a
strange land, as tangled as the maze at Hampton Court, with mountains
instead of hedges. So broken and so confused is the ground, that I
despair of conveying a clear impression of it.
The Malakand is like a great cup, of which the rim is broken into
numerous clefts and jagged points. At the bottom of this cup is the
"crater" camp. The deepest cleft is the Malakand Pass. The highest of
the jagged points is Guides Hill, on a spur of which the fort stands. It
needs no technical knowledge to see, that to defend such a place, the
rim of the cup must be held. But in the Malakand, the bottom of the cup
is too small to contain the necessary garrison. The whole position is
therefore, from the military point of view, bad and indefensible. In the
revised and improved scheme of defence, arrangements have been made, to
command the available approaches, and to block such as cannot be
commanded with barbed wire entanglements and other obstructions; and by
a judicious system of works much of the rim is now held.
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