{"book":"adl0957","page":264,"text":"211\n\nriver Tarnak seems to be almost exhausted. The last stage is Mohmand, only ten miles from Kandahar. Here begins the proper plain of Kandahar. About two miles outside the city there is a beautiful garden, called Manzil Bagh, which is now the headquarters of Morrison-Knudsen Engineering Company.\n\nKandahar (Height 3,500 ft., population 100,000): Kandahar, the capital of Ahmad Shah Durrani, is 125 miles from Quetta and only 70 miles from the railway terminus of New Chaman. It is, of course, a point of great commercial and strategical importance, and has played an important role in the history of the country. It is situated on a level and richly cultivated plain of Arachosia (or Arakosia) at the foot of Tarnak Valley, and is separated from the river of that name by a short range of hills which divides the lower part of the valley and runs parallel with the river for about twenty miles. These hills are called Torkani, that is, Black Stone, and attain a height of some 1,000 feet above the plain. The city of Kandahar is surrounded on two sides, north and west, by high, bare and sharp-pointed rocky mountains rising abruptly from the plain. They have very curious shapes and names and are called “The Elephant”, “The Camel”, “The Ant-Heap” etc., and indeed they deserve these names. The old city of Kandahar is large, populous and well planned. It is four-sided and rectangular in shape, 2,000 by 600 yards, the length being north to south. The streets are straight, wide and flanked by trees. It is an active commercial and industrial centre, and has undergone most radical changes during the last twenty years. If one walks along the main streets, one cannot recognise the Kandahar described by travellers of old. A new city with fine buildings and up-to-date facilities has sprung up outside the walled city of Kandahar on the road leading to Herat.","chars":1865,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00264.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/264","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/264","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."}}