To enhance Chiltistan's defensibility, the Government decides to construct a road across the territory with support from the Khan who sees opportunities for increased trade and personal profit.

The pair become firm friends, and during their schooldays and later at Oxford they imagine collaborating to continue the work of Dick's late father, extending the road right across Chiltistan and over the passes "to the foot of the Hindu Kush."

Linforth joins the army and is sent to Chatham, where he waits interminably for an Indian posting that will take him to Chiltistan to start his intended life's work on the road.

The British Government becomes weary of the Khan's profligacy in Chiltistan, and decides to force him to step down in favour of his son, now fully English-Educated and Westernised.

While he considered the book's opening to be one of the most brilliant that Mason ever wrote, he felt that the social atmosphere of the time was hard to recapture and that the later parts of the story "fade away into forgetfulness".

[3] Green noted that The Broken Road was the author's only novel with a purpose, namely to criticise the then-fashion for bringing Indian princes over to England to be privately educated, introducing them to polite English society, and then sending them back to India where they suddenly found themselves treated by the British Government there as the inferior race.

[2] The book drew attention to the existence of a regulation that prevented soldiers of the British Indian Army, no matter how valorous, from being eligible to receive the Victoria Cross.