Captain Rollo Burslem was an English officer stationed in Kabul. Burslem accompanied his friend Lieutenant Sturt on a mission surveying the mountain passes of Hindy Kush. This is an account of their 1840 travels. A passage from the beginning of the book reads "The following pages are literally what they profess to be, a record from a few weeks snatched from a soldier's life in Afghanistan, and spent in travels through a region which few Europeans have ever viewed before. The notes from which it is complied were written on the desert mountains of central Asia, with very little opportunity, as will easily be supposed, for study or polish. Under these circumstances it can hardly be necessary to deprecate the criticism of the reader. Composition is not the acquirements usually expected of a soldier. What is looked for in his narrative in not elegance, but plainness. He sees more than other people, but he studies less, and the strangeness of his story must make up for the want in ornament."