{"book":"adl0957","page":105,"text":"76\n\nside of the carpet. A flash of the knife and the ends are cut short. Knots after knots thus slip from under the nimble fingers till the ground work begins to glow with different colours—raspberry and wine reds, pinks and browns, relieved with white and black. The heddle raises some of the threads of the groundwork, and leaves the others, while both hands draw the strong elastic thread of the weft—the margin of the row.\n\nThen the hands pick up the heavy comb of hard wood and, with a few smart blows along the last row of the weft, drive the knots close up to the one before. Twenty rows, up to eight thousand knots, are made in a day, but in a square metre of any carpet there are eight hundred thousand knots to be tied and thickened.\n\nThe close rows of varicoloured knots of uneven worsted steadily advance over the monotone of the background, and the pattern glimmers vaguely through the broken colours. But now the two small hands wield the great scissors, and the razor-keen blades crop the ragged ends of the knots to exactly three millimetres above the foundation. The harmonious design flashes into sudden brilliance of silken woollen pile.\n\nWhen the busy fingers need a rest, the carpet-weavers turn to a cup of tea, which is quaffed from a small gay faience.\n\nThe wool of these carpets is dyed with the unfading colours obtained from the madder plant, cochineal, Sihchoba, etc., which last for centuries. It is interesting to note that old carpets fetch higher prices than the new ones, for the brilliancy of their colours, which is enhanced by constant use and rubbing.\n\nNext to carpets, the making of sheepskin coats and vests is a flourishing industry. Usually the edges and sleeves of the coats are embroidered with yellow silk. Coats of other furs,","chars":1771,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00105.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/105","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/105","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}