{"book":"adl0957","page":221,"text":"174\n\ndays of May can be wet and cold. May and early June are delightful, but towards the end of June the valleys get rather warm, and it is well then to move higher into the hills. Spring gives you the new blossoms and the low snow, which enhances the landscape so much; but autumn gives the wonderful glory of changing leaf, with a background of newly fallen snow on the neighbouring hills. Even winter has its own charms, specially for those who are fond of skiing and skating.\nSince the country is composed of lowlands and highlands, one may follow the climate of one's choice simply by going higher as the summer advances, and then gradually descending as do the shepherds and their flocks, following the melting snow upwards, until in the autumn the new snow drives them down again. It is, fascinating thus to follow spring from the valleys into hills, to be always level with the first new blossoms, until at last, you come up to the passess, the winter ever clearing before you, and a rich carpet of mountain flowers ever about your feet—wild flowers that have gone from the places where you camped only a fortnight earlier.\n\nTransportation and Communications:\nAt present there are no railways and navigable waterways in Afghanistan. There are about 5,000 miles of motorable roads, but these are inadequate to meet the growing needs of the country. The burden of transportation falls upon motors, lorries, trucks and pack animals.\nThere is a regular Postal Service throughout the country and even up to Peshawar and New Chaman. A limited number of passengers can travel by these buses. Taxis are also available. The Government of Afghanistan has recently established a Department of Civil Aviation—the Aryana Airlines—providing a passenger and air mail service between the capital and a number of","chars":1803,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00221.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/221","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/221","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."}}