{"book":"adl0957","page":136,"text":"101\n\nFrom Parun Pass onwards lies the forest zone. Here most of the houses are built of wood, with stones only in the foundation. The population, Nuristanis as they are called, are of pure Aryan type, tall, slim, and extremely handsome. They embraced Islam towards the close of the nineteeth century during the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan.\n\nPACTIA (SAMT-I-JUNUBI or the Southern Province). It lies south of Kabul, and occupies comparatively a smaller area. This region is mostly hilly and is covered with fine cedar forests. From an agricultural point this province is not rich and is very sparsely populated, but its chief importance lies in its strategical position, for here roads radiate to Kabul, Ghazni and Bannu. The province is the home of some of the most warlike and brave Afghan tribes, who have played an important rôle in the defence of the country.\n\nSome of the forest districts are indeed very lovely and possess a healthful climate. The hilly districts are extremely cold in winter, but summers are generally genial. Khost is the hottest part of this region.\n\nGardez, the chief town of the province, stands at an elevation of 7,200 feet, and is colder than Kabul. During summer it is much cooler and has genial climate.\n\nChief items of export are: timber, charcoal, honey and pignolia.","chars":1305,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00136.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/136","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/136","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."}}