{"book":"adl0957","page":54,"text":"35\n\nThis darkness is sometimes accompanied by a blast of the Simoon—a wind which is generally destructive to vegetables as well as to human and animal life.\n\nRainfall is very scanty; nowhere more than 15 inches in a year. The Monsoon, which sweeps over India from June to September, brings rain only to the eastern valleys that lead to the Indus, and the rest of the country is totally dry during summer months. Afghanistan gets much of its precipitation as winter snow, and a small but very important contribution of rain in spring. The rainfall of the country is neither certain nor well-distributed. These spring-rains are nearly always accompanied by thunderstorms, hail and sudden downpours, causing great damage to houses, fields, and fruit-trees.\n\nThe winter-snow results from the cold north-west winds. Usually there are half a dozen snow-falls (from December to the end of February). Throughout the mountainous districts snow lies on the ground for several months, while the villagers remain inside their huts for the greater part of the day, if there is no sunshine.\n\nOne of the chief characteristics of the Afghan climate is the clear blue sky and the large amount of sunshine throughout the year. Almost cloudless skies are the rule in summer, and even in winter, clouds are less numerous than would be expected. The unpleasant chill of winter finds compensation to some extent in the bright sunshine. A comparatively low rainfall and blue skies render the mountain scenery an enticement to the tourists coming from countries of foggy atmosphere.\n\nThe dry summer conditions are ideal for the ripening of delicious fruits for which Afghanistan is famous throughout the world. Typical examples are the citrus fruits of Jalalabad","chars":1738,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00054.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/54","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/54","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."}}