Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

... strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.