“It is clear that a safe identification of the territory intended cannot be based upon such characteristics of its people as Marco Polo’s account here notes obviously from hearsay, but must reckon in the first place with the plainly stated bearing and distance.  And Sir Henry Yule’s difficulty arose just from the fact that what the information accessible to him seemed to show about the location of the name Pashai could not be satisfactorily reconciled with those plain topographical data.  Marco’s great commentator, thoroughly familiar as he was with whatever was known in his time about the geography of the western Hindukush and the regions between Oxus and Indus, could not fail to recognize the obvious connection between our Pashai and the tribal name Pashai borne by Muhammanized Kafirs who are repeatedly mentioned in mediaeval and modern accounts of Kabul territory.  But all these accounts seemed to place the Pashais in the vicinity of the great Panjshir valley, north-east of Kabul, through which passes one of the best-known routes from the Afghan capital to the Hindukush watershed and thence to the Middle Oxus.  Panjshir, like Kabul itself, lies to the south-west of Badakshan, and it is just this discrepancy of bearing together with one in the distance reckoned to Kashmir which caused Sir Henry Yule to give expression to doubts when summing up his views about Nogodar’s route.”

From Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India we learn that to the south of the range of the Hindukush “the languages spoken from Kashmir in the east to Kafiristan in the west are neither of Indian nor of Iranian origin, but form a third branch of the Aryan stock of the great Indo-European language family.  Among the languages of this branch, now rightly designated as ‘Dardic,’ the Kafir group holds a very prominent place.  In the Kafir group again we find the Pashai language spoken over a very considerable area.  The map accompanying Sir George Grierson’s monograph on ‘The Pisaca Languages of North-Western India’ [Asiatic Society Monographs, VIII., 1906], shows Pashai as the language spoken along the right bank of the Kunar river as far as the Asmar tract as well as in the side valleys which from the north descend towards it and the Kabul river further west.  This important fact makes it certain that the tribal designation of Pashai, to which this Kafir language owes its name, has to this day an application extending much further east than was indicated by the references which travellers, mediaeval and modern, along the Panjshir route have made to the Pashais and from which alone this ethnic name was previously known.”

Stein comes to the conclusion that “the Mongols’ route led across the Mandal Pass into the great Kafir valley of Bashgol and thus down to Arnawai on the Kunar.  Thence Dir could be gained directly across the Zakhanna Pass, a single day’s march.  There were alternative routes, too, available to the same destination either by ascending the Kunar to Ashreth and taking the present ‘Chitral Road’ across the Lowarai, or descending the river to Asmar and crossing the Binshi Pass.”