In the winter people keep themselves warm by means of a charcoal brazier or sandali, which I will describe presently. In the city, the houses being crowded so close to one another, it was to me a source of wonder how the owners could prevent themselves being overlooked. I was informed that if a man standing on the top of his house could see into his neighbour’s enclosure, even into the garden, he was compelled by law to build a wall or screen to cut off his view: a violation of the privacy of a man’s dwelling by looking over the wall is a great offence in Afghanistan. [Sidenote: The Building of the House.] When a house is to be built, a trench two feet deep is dug and large stones or pieces of rock, unshaped, are packed in with a mixture of clay and chopped straw. This is the foundation. The thickness of the wall depends on the class of house and the height it is to be built. Two feet is about the thickness of the wall of a house one story high. In the poorer houses the wall is built of lumps of clay or mud mixed with chopped straw: in the better houses, of sun-dried bricks six inches square, an inch thick, and laid on the flat: in the best, of similar bricks properly baked. The roof is supported on beams of unshaped poplar. The wood being of poor quality the beams are arranged close together, with a space of not more than two or three inches between each. The beams are covered with rush matting, or, in some houses, little pieces of wood, about four inches long and an inch wide, are placed from beam to beam close together. Over this or the matting is placed clay and chopped straw to the thickness of eight or nine inches. Upper floors are made in precisely the same way. As there is very little rain in the country, a house built in this manner will stand for years, but it is necessary to repair the roof every autumn. When a poor-class house is carried more than one story high, the upper stories, often projecting beyond the lower, are framed with wooden beams--poplar--and the interspaces filled in with sun-dried bricks, making a wall one brick thick. The builder never trusts to the lower wall alone to support a second or third story, but invariably fixes uprights of wood in the ground against the wall to support the first floor. This may be because the extra stories have been added on as the need for more space became urgent. In the older houses the walls are rarely perpendicular, but bulge and lean in all sorts of dreadful ways. If a house seems inclined to tumble over on one side, several extra props of wood are fixed under it. Sometimes an unusual amount of rain in the autumn will wash a house down, and not infrequently an earthquake will shake one to pieces. But considering how they are built, and what they look like, it is astonishing how long they stand.