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194 uncouth as they are, there is about them a deep religious aura. Whatever your religion, you cannot help feeling that the artists who carved them have put all their faith into their work, and that at least some of their spirit is still there. And if you look at them at night, especially if there is a moon......well, you may think that they are still alive. "However few and scattered the ruins may be now, it is difficult to evoke the Bamian of old, as Huien Tsang saw it—when the Buddhas stood in all their glory, gilded and poly-chromed; when the caves were full of shaven monks in their yellow robes singing the praises of the Blessed One; when the last descendants of the great Kushan conquerors were still trying to keep up the artistic traditions of their ancestors; and when the town, the size of which was said to be so great that a child lost in its streets was only identified again as an old man of 75, was pulsating with life". There is an unmistakably religious atmosphere around Bamian. It was, as we have seen, an important Buddhist centre and it must have been a religious centre before that. In the days of old, when Bamian was lying on the great caravan route between India and China, travellers, after days spent battling across the Hindukush, where nature is so fierce and seems ready to crush man at any moment, suddenly saw opening in front of them the Valley of Bamian—green, peaceful, full of flowing streams, crowned by the majesty of Koh-i-Baba—and they must have thought it a gift of God for the grant of this oasis in the wilderness of the mountains." Bamian, though now in ruins, is still one of the curiosities of the world. The city was swept off the face of the valley by