{"book":"adl0957","page":247,"text":"196\n\nmuch calcium and has gradually formed, during thousands of years, the five splendid lakes of the Band-i-Zulficar, Pudina, Panir, Haibat and Ghulaman. Band-i-Zulficar, the largest of them does not, at its greatest breadth, exceed 200 metres, but its length is about five kilometres.\n\nBand-i-Amir, as is true of most of the world's wonders, has its legends. It is said that a most puissant monarch named Barbar reigned from this region over the valleys of Koh-i-Baba and the Hindu Kush, and even beyond that. The legends place his capital at a place some 25 miles from Band-i-Amir, north-west of the Yakaolang, called Shahr-i-Barbar or Chihil Burj. It is said that in those days the water flowed in a head-long torrent that menaced the forts of the city and even threatened Balkh. In order to curb the stream, Barbar Shah commanded a thousand slaves to work each day from morn till eve in damming them. At last through a miracle of the Fourth Caliph, Ali, the waters impounded themselves and formed the existing five lakes Later on 18 canals were dug out of them for irrigating the northern regions of this district.\n\nA quantity of water, sufficient to turn a water-wheel, flows into the lake of Band-i-Amir. The same amount of water descends on the spillways of Band-i-Haibat, the last of the lakes forming cascades. Moving along from the source of the lakes, the first that comes into view is the Band-i-Zulficar, the largest of them all. The second is the Band-i-Pudina. From this lake the water flows leisurely to Band-i-Panir. As the retaining walls of this lake are white, so it was given this name, which means the \"Lake of Cheese\". Next comes the lake of Haibat, the most beautiful of all. This lake has a length of four killometres","chars":1743,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00247.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/247","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/247","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."}}