{"book":"adl0957","page":36,"text":"respect is that these rivers have a seasonal flow, being fed during\nthe rainy season, which does not last for more than four months,\nand for the rest of the year they are practically without any ap-\npreciable flow. The full utilization of the waters of these rivers\nis, therefore, possible only by the construction of dams and\nlarge storage reservoirs at suitable points, which in a hilly country\nlike Afghanistan, are not lacking. The flow of the stored water,\nas it is let out for purposes of irrigation, can also be utilized for\ngenerating electric energy.\n\nThe rivers of Afghanistan can easily be divided into three\ncategories: (1) Those that flow to the north, most of them\nultimately disappearing in oases from which there is no outlet; (2)\nthose that run to the east and empty themselves into the Indus ;\n(3) those that run to a finish in the swamps and Hamuns of Hel-\nmand.\n\n(1) The rivers of the Oxus basin :\n\nThe Oxus.—Its old and classical names are: Wehrodh,\nKui Shu, Wurhu, and Jaihun. The modern name of Amu is\nderived from the town of Amul, later Amu and Amuyah.\n\nThe Amu is the largest river of Central Asia, being 1,400\nmiles long, and serves as a natural boundary between Afghanis-\ntan and Russian Turkestan for some 400 miles. Rising in the\nplateau of the Little Pamir, which in winter is a world of snow\nand ice, the Amu flows west through the depression of Central\nAsia, and after leaving the Afghan border at Kham-i-Ab, turns\nnorth-west and traverses a vast desert. It ultimately falls into\nthe Sea of Aral.\n\nIn its upper course the Amu is generally known by the\nname of Punja or Five Rivers. Contributing to the volume of its\nupper waters are two principal streams—the Pamir and the Aksu.","chars":1711,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00036.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/36","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/36","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."}}