{"book":"adl0957","page":46,"text":"29\n\nmoderately placid and shallow, the fords are always bad because of the boulders and stones in the bed.\n\nThe Kunar valley of Bashgul, or Arnawai, together lead up to the Mandal and Dorah Passes, either of which is the gateway to the rich valleys of Eastern Afghanistan, and opens a direct line to Jalalabad from the Oxus, which does not touch Kabul at all. These passes are high, difficult, and very much more deeply buried under snow than those further west. The Broghil Pass, which leads out of the Yarkhun valley into Wakhan, is practicable for laden animals during eight months of the year. The Dorah Pass is also much trodden, and is also used by pack animals as a commerical link between the Kunar valley and Badakhshan, but it is open for traffic for three months only—from July to September.\n\nOther important rivers of this category are : the Kurram, the Tochi, the Gomal, the Kundil and the Sharan Toi, all flowing east to join the Aba-sin, or the Indus.\n\n(3) Rivers that empty their waters into the Seistan Lakes: The most important river of this group is the Helmand, which drains the south-western part of the country. The name also takes the forms of Heirmand and Hilman ; ancient names are : Etymander, Etyman-doros, Erymanthus and Hætumat.\n\nThe Helmand is the largest of the inland rivers, being 625 miles in length. It rises in an elevated valley on the western side of the Paghman range, an offshoot of the great Hindu Kush. In its preliminary course, for a distance of nearly 200 miles, it flows in a westerly direction through the heart of Hazara country. Then it breaks out of the mountains and drains the open country and cultivated plains of Zamindawar. Below Girishk it receives the joint stream—the Arghandab-Tranak-Arghastan—which drains south-western Afghanistan. The Helmand then enters a desert","chars":1825,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00046.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/46","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/46","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."}}