The Hindu Kush is a changed mountain range whose foothills become a place of recreation and encounter in the later history of humanity. It links the Second Men’s expansion into Africa with the first sighting of the Martians, placing exploration and an unprecedented encounter in the same broad mountainous region.

The Transformed Range

The narrative refers to the range as the new and gigantic Hindu Kush and elsewhere describes the mountains as titanic, once known by that name. The wording presents the landscape as one altered across vast stretches of time, rather than as an unchanged feature of the earlier world. The passages do not explain how the range changed, but its scale and transformed identity mark the distant future setting.

Route into Africa

As the Second Men advanced beyond their earlier way of life, they sent an expedition across the Hindu Kush to explore Africa. There the explorers encountered subhuman descendants of a Siberian ship’s crew, whose descendants had spread south through America and across the new Atlantic Isthmus. The range thus appears as a crossing point in the Second Men’s expansion, while the expedition’s discovery reveals how far separated human-descended populations had spread.

Foothills and First Sighting

In a later episode, the foothills of the mountains contain holiday centres where young men and women from Asia seek the dangers and hardships of Alpine pursuits. Shortly after a summer dawn, walkers in this district become the first humans to see the Martians. They notice a greenish sky and then many small, shifting cloudlike forms moving toward a snowy peak and creeping down its rock face. The Hindu Kush setting turns a familiar outing into the threshold of an encounter with life from beyond humanity’s world.