have been
unvisited and forgotten till the present traveller unearthed them. A
similar spiritual drought seems to have fallen on the Armenian and
Nestorian Churches of those parts, and, deadened and retrograde,
they were unable to withstand the great Muhammadan invasions of the
sixth and succeeding centuries, which swept like tornadoes right
across Asia into China.

In again proclaiming the Gospel in Turkestan the Christian Church will
only be reoccupying her lost territories, where at one time Christian
congregations gathered in their churches, but for centuries only the
Muhammadan call to prayer has been permitted to be heard.

It is a reproach, again, because on our North-West Frontier, only
separated from Chitral by a range of mountains, is the interesting land
known as Kafiristan. There is reason to believe that the inhabitants
of this land, known as the Kafirs, are the descendants of some of
the Greeks whom Alexander of Macedon brought over in his train three
hundred years before Christ. Two stories are current among the Kafirs
regarding their origin, but both point to their arrival about the third
century before Christ. One is that a number of Greeks, expelled from
the lowlands by the advance of surrounding and more powerful tribes,
took refuge in these mountain fastnesses; and the other is that they
are the descendants of wounded soldiers left by Alexander the Great
in the neighbouring region of Bajour. They still practised till a
few years ago pagan idolatrous rites, which had probably changed
little for two thousand years, and they resisted the inroads of the
Muhammadans, who were obliged to recoil before their inaccessible
mountain fastnesses. They welcomed some Christian missionaries
who visited their valleys at different times in the last century,
and there is every reason to believe that, had the Christian Church
accepted the task, the whole of that nation would have adopted the
Christian religion. But though these travellers urged on the Church
her opportunity and her responsibility, no step was taken.

Colonel Wingate, a retired frontier officer, writes: [4] "I had gone
for a stroll one day in the summer of 1895 with another officer for
a short distance outside the military camp. Though we were wearing
the uniform of officers, we were without arms, when suddenly we saw
a party of natives approaching. They were travelling at a rapid rate,
and as they drew near we observed that they were armed with bows