{"book":"adl0957","page":143,"text":"106\n\nsaddle in front of him, and goes off at full gallop; the others chasing him until one of them catches up with him. While still at full gallop the two riders struggle for the possession of the body. The man who gets it is in turn chased by others, and when the carcass falls to the ground, as it often does, it is picked up as the riders gallop by, the horsemen riding with one leg and arm thrown over the horse to enable them to reach the ground. So the game continues until one of the teams is able to bring the body of the animal to the appointed spot and drop it in the circle, thus scoring a goal. The speed and agility of these horses as well as the remarkable skill of the riders is a wonderful and awe-inspiring sight.\nThe great delight of the Afghans, both male and female, is to dance the Attan. From ten to twenty men or women stand up in a circle. A person takes his place within the circle to sing or play on some instrument. The dancers then go through a number of attitudes and figures, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, at other times clapping their hands and snapping their fingers in unison. Every now and then they join hands and move first slowly then swiftly, sometimes making a full circle round one leg, according to the music, while all join in the chorus.\nAnother game which is commonly played in the country goes by the name of Ghursai. A man takes his left foot in his right hand, and hops about one leg, endeavouring to knock down his opponent, who is advancing in the same way from the opposite direction. Hunting birds and animals is also a very popular amusement. The old methods of catching wild animals are still in vogue in some parts of the country. Men often go out with greyhounds (Afghan hounds), hawks, and falcons to catch birds and course hares, foxes and deer.","chars":1811,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00143.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/143","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/143","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."}}