{"book":"adl0957","page":144,"text":"107\n\nThe more prosperous hunters, equipped with shotguns, have live decoys which they place in a kind of pond (Nowr as it is locally called), built especially for the event. When the wild ducks fly over, the Judas-ducks call, and their wild brothers come down to be shot.\n\nThe farmers and villagers capture hundreds of game birds without arms of any kind. A favourite method is to build across a small stream a pond which empties with a gentle current. When the pond empties, the hunter builds a low hut of mud and twigs across it. The hut has a trap entrance and no exit. A flight of weary and unsuspecting ducks is attracted to the pond by decoys and are made to feel so much at home that they spend the night there. As they sleep, the current wafts them gently into the trap and they finish on the dining tables.\n\nOne of the most remarkable characteristics of the Afghans is their hospitality. The importance of this virtue is so much a national point of honour that their reproach to an inhospitable man is that he has no Pashtunwali, that is nothing of the customs of the Afghans. All persons indiscriminately are entitled to benefit by this practice, and a man who travels over the whole country, will never be in want of a meal, except perhaps in towns. For the feast given in honour of the guest, the host would not hesitate to kill the fattest sheep or the best fowls which he possesses. At dinner he presses the guest to have more and more, and entreats him not to spare, for there is plenty to eat. If the guest is not inclined to do full justice to all the dishes offered, the host feels rather insulted in the presence of his friends, who are always invited on such occasions.\n\nAnother remarkable custom peculiar to the Afghans is called Nang or Ninawati, that is, seeking the help or protection of","chars":1811,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00144.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/144","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/144","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."}}