In the shadow of the old citadel in Herat, between the wood cutter’s yard and the spice market, stood this covered reservoir commissioned in 1634 by a Safavid governor. The photograph was made from an entrance on the opposite side from the one visible in the picture. Most of the cities of Central Asia and the Middle East are built on a layer cake of destruction and rebuilding. Herat has been destroyed many times.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/4/A01.jpg
This Mosque is located on a hill from which Herat can be seen in the distance. It is shrine to a saint, Khoja Abdulla Ansari, who died in 1088. He was very fond of cats. The present form of the structure was built by Shahrukh, the son of Timur-i-Lang (Timur the Lame or Tamerlane) in 1428. When this mosque was built, Herat was one of the most important artistic centers in the world. At that time the city had a population at least five times that of London or Paris, and was the capitol of an empire that stretched from Iraq to China. Herat had famous colleges, libraries, public baths, monumental architecture, and painters like Bihzad, whose styles were followed by Mogul and Persian artists for centuries.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/4/A02.jpg
Though many of the glazed tiles have been replaced during subsequent periods, the Friday Mosque in Herat was given its present form during the closing years of the fifteenth century. Apart from numerous small neighborhood mosques for daily prayer, most communities in the Islamic world have a larger mosque for Friday services with a sermon. This was not always the largest mosque in Herat; a much larger complex also built by the Timurids, the Mosque and Madressa of Gawharshad, was located to the north. Those architectural monuments were dynamited by officers of the Indian Army under British supervision in 1885 so that it could not be used as a fortress during a Russian invasion. Since 1974 when the photograph was taken, a great deal of fighting has taken place in Herat, but reports from those who saw Herat in 1992 say that this mosque has survived.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/4/A03.jpg
Afghanistan has a desert in the south, a ridge of high mountains and uplands running east to west through the center, and rolling hills, and flood plains north of the mountains. From Herat in the west to Kandahar in the south-central part of the country is a distance of some 560 km across open desert and rough volcanic terrain. As one nears Kandahar, a center of power for the fierce Pushtun tribes, the land becomes more fertile and the scenery is increasingly dramatic. This picture, looking toward the mountains from the south, was taken near sunset.
Although some contemporary scholars have suggested other possibilities for the origin of the name, it has long been believed that Kandahar takes its name from its founder, Alexander of Macedon – “Iskandahar” is Arabic for Alexander. In the nineteenth century, the first serious British defeat at the hands of the Afghans was a messy guerilla warfare situation in which the Afghans destroyed a convoy attempting to retreat from Kabul to Peshawer. The second time two decades later was different. The two parties met here on open ground near Kandahar, but again the British were defeated.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/4/A05.jpg
There is a mystic thread of life
So dearly wreath’d with mine alone,
That Destiny’s relentless knife
At once must sever both, or none.