Through the Heart of Afghanistan

Few people recall today that Germany and Afghanistan were once close friends, allied in their mutual distrust of the then still-powerful British Empire. Within the space of a few years the British had beaten the Germans on the battlefields of the First World War. A few years later these same English victors used their military machine, complete with state-of-the-art airplanes based in India, to bomb their Afghan neighbors into political submission.

It was during the early 1920s, while both Germany and Afghanistan were thus licking their wounds and regaining their political power, that the German geologist Emile Trinkler made his legendary trip across the forbidden kingdom of Afghanistan.

The Afghan king had shut his borders to the majority of outsiders, which further heightened the kingdom's already famous isolation.

Yet having arrived at the Afghan border via Russian Turkestan, Trinkler wasn't about to go back. He mounted a local horse and rode off across the vast interior of that still-beautiful country. "Through the Heart of Afghanistan" describes his journey. Its pages are sprinkled with the author's reminiscences of a Central Asian world now passed into memory. Solitary peaks. Peaceful valleys. Sunny plains and blazing deserts are all to be found on these loving pages.

Trinkler saw Afghanistan as she still was, asleep and dreaming in the last stages of her long medieval slumber. Amply illustrated with a series of period photographs, "Through the Heart of Afghanistan" takes the reader back in time, on the back of a horse, and in the company of a gentle man, to a country now recalled only in legends.