Tirah comprises an area of some six to seven hundred square miles and includes under this general name all the valleys lying round the source of the Bara River. The five chief valleys are Maidan, Rajgul, Waran, Bara and Mastura. Maidan, the summer home of the Afridis, lies close under the snow-bound ridges of the Safed Koh at an elevation of about . It is an oval plain about seven to eight miles (13 km) long, and three or four wide, and slopes inwards towards the centre of its northern side, where all the drainage gathered from the four corners of the plain is shot into a narrow corkscrew outlet leading to the Bara Valley.