{"book":"adl0957","page":135,"text":"100\n\nHigher up the river the valley closes long before Chitral is\nreached. It narrows exceedingly. Here the northern winds\nrage down the funnel with bitter fury and make life burdensome.\nThe villages take to the hill slopes or cluster in patches on the\nterraces at the feet of the hills.\n\nTo the south-west of the great gorges that come down from\nthe Pamirs lies the most fascinating region of Nuristan (old\nname Kafiristan, that is the Land of the Unbelievers). Until\n1892 a popular legend and belief peopled this region with the\ndescendants of Alexander's army-men whom he had left\nbehind. In that year, George Robertson entered the country\ntwice, on the latter occasion making a prolonged stay, visiting\nseveral of the valleys and staying at the villages. He made close\nstudy of their languages, manners and customs. His report for\nthe first time dispelled the idea that the inhabitants of this part\nof the country had any Macedonian origin. It is also related\nthat when the Macedonian army was passing that way, some-\nwhere among these hills, probably at the lower spurs of the\nthree-peaked Koh-i-Noor, there dwelt a people who told the\ninvaders that they were the descendants of the western people\nwho had come into those parts with their god Dionysus. Nuris-\ntan has created much interest in various foreign countries,\nseveral missions (from Germany and Denmark) having visited\nit quite recently.\n\nThe valleys of Nuristan strike the traveller with their neat-\nness, their beauty and well-cultivated fields. Near the houses\nare planted trees, laid out paths, and carefully conducted water-\nways, by which the antiquity of sedentary culture is felt. The\ncrops are sown in small patches. Every foot of land is cultiva-\nted. The fields are surrounded by fences.","chars":1763,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00135.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/135","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/135","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."}}