Ghazni was then a large town "surrounded by mud walls and a ditch. There are many houses and permanent markets in Ghazni; much business is done there. It is one of the 'entrepots' of India. Kabul is nine days' journey from it." This is not much to say of the city which had been enriched by the spoils carried away from Muttra and Somnath, and by the treasures amassed during seventeen fierce raids of that Mahmud who, by repeated conquests, made all Northern and Western India contribute to his treasury.
Later, in 1332, the Arab traveller, Ibn Batuta, writes of Ghazni as a small town set in a waste of ruins--a description which fits it not inaptly at the present day; but in Idrisi's time, before the wars with Ghur led to its destruction, whilst still the wealth of a great part of India supported its magnificence, and whilst it was still the theme of glowing panegyric by contemporary historians, one would expect a rather more enthusiastic notice. But even Kabul (nine days' journey distant from Ghazni) is only recognized as "_L'une des grandes villes de l'Inde, entourée de murs_," with a "_bonne citadelle et au dehors divers faubourgs_."[5]
There is little to interest us, however, in tracing out the routes that linked up Ghazni and Kabul with the Helmund. They have been the same through all time, with just the difference of place-names. Towns and villages, caravanserais and posts, have come and gone, but that historic road has been marked out by Nature as one of the grandest high-roads in Asia, from the days of Alexander to those of Roberts. Two minars tapering to the sky on the plain before Ghazni are all that are left of its ancient glories, and one cannot but contrast the scattered debris of that once so famous city with the solid endurance of the far greater and older architectural efforts in Egypt and Assyria. Southern Afghanistan is indeed singularly poor and empty of historic monuments. Even now were Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat, its three great cities, to be flattened out by a widespread earthquake there would be little that was not of Buddhist origin left for the future archæologist to make a stir about.
Idrisi writes of the Kingdom of Ghur as apart from Herat, although a great part of the long Herat valley was certainly included. He calls it a country "mountainous and well inhabited, where one finds springs, rivers, and gardens--easy to defend and very fertile. There are many cultivated fields and flocks. The inhabitants speak a language which is not that of the people of Khorasan, and they are not Mohammedans." Who were they? The Khilkhis or Ghilzais we know at that time overspread the southern hills of Dawar; but who were the people speaking a strange language in the land of the Chahar Aimak where now dwell the Taimanis, unless they were the Taimanis themselves whose traditions date from the time of Moses?