{"book":"adl0957","page":52,"text":"33\n\nthe reflection of which in the bluish-green and transparent water below, adds to the charm of these lakes.\n\nIn addition to these there are a few small salt lakes in the western part of the Herat province. There are also a good many signs of other ancient lakes in this locality which have dried up, and it is on this account that the place is called Namaksar, that is, Salt-Desert.\n\nOn the top of the mountain next to Paghman there is a small lake called Hauz-i-Khas, a splendid place for those who are interested in mountaineering.\n\nClimate.—The climate of the country, generally speaking, is cold in winter, hot and dry in summer. The central plateau, owing to its higher altitude, is cooler than the rest of the country, which has an intensely high temperature (of over 100° F.) during the summer months (June and July). It is generally characteristic of the Afghan climate that there is a great variation of temperatures between winter and summer, day and night, sun and shade. These variations are, however, less pronounced in the east, where the climate merges with that of pre-partitioned India. On the whole, the climate should be pronounced as extreme, ranging from—12° to 110° F.\n\nAfghanistan is far removed from the moderating influence of the sea. There are no cooling sea breezes to counteract the heat of summer, nor are there warm ocean currents and pleasant westerly winds to mitigate the cold of winter.\n\nHigh up in any of the numerous and beautiful side valleys or upon the meadowy slopes of the Hindu Kush, Speen Ghar or Koh-i-Baba, almost any gradation of climate is to be had. Thus while at Kabul (6,000 ft.), in July, the mean temperature","chars":1664,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00052.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/52","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/52","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."}}