The first Taliban body lay sprawled in a ditch next to the castle's front gateway. After a short walk through an avenue of splintered pines and outbuildings full of bullet holes, there were more bodies.
The blackened and shot-up remains of mini-vans and a Red Cross vehicle sat in the gravel car park. Around a corner, it got worse. In the main courtyard of the small citadel where the Taliban fighters had been imprisoned - and where they were said by their jailers to have rebelled - some 40 foreign volunteers lay dead in the dust.
Few of the castle's soldiers showed much pity for their dead Taliban adversaries. I watched as one soldier gingerly eased the trainers off a Taliban corpse; by early afternoon there were few pairs of shoes left. Other soldiers looted the armoury and helped themselves to dozens of second world war rifles.
"We don't think the Pakistanis should have come here. We would be delighted if America dropped its bombs on Pakistan next," Anamraj, a plainclothes policeman said, wandering among the ruins. "If we had allowed the Taliban to surrender they would simply have started fighting again. We had no alternative but to kill them." Several had their hands tied behind the back. They had been shot before they had been able to take cover. Why, I wondered, had they been executed?
"Many of them were concealing grenades. They could explode them and kill us," one soldier explained. "We are sorry that they were killed, because they were Muslims. But you also have to remember that they were terrorists," he said.
In the stable area, fires still smouldered. The bodies of 20 grinning horses lay bloating in the dirt. One had survived; it rolled on the ground, its leg broken.
The fin-tailed rockets had been piled neatly against a wall. Next to the shattered remains of what was once the kitchen, a rocket lay mounted on a tripod. It was here, hidden among an avenue of sylvan pine trees, that the Taliban had made their final stand.
There were few clues as to why the foreign volunteers who rioted in the Qala-i-Jhangi castle on Sunday had refused to give up. But fluttering amid the pinecones and the bombed out remains of a house where the Taliban had been sheltering, were several Koranic primers written in Arabic.
It was clear enough that the Taliban volunteers had been alternately reading the Koran, then lobbing mortars at their enemies who surrounded them from the castle's high mud battlements - and who finally engulfed them.
It had been textbook jihad, apparently provoked by two blundering CIA agents who had wandered into the compound searching for members of al-Qaida. The CIA have been liaising closely with General Dostam over the treatment of prisoners but had failed to observe the first rule of espionage: always keep a low profile.
The fighters had wanted martyrdom; and after a barbarous four-day battle almost all of them had got it. Everything had appeared to be over yesterday morning. But, incredibly, two of the 400 Taliban prisoners who had been taken to the fort on the muddy outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif were still alive at 9 a.m.
They had concealed themselves in the deep basement of a military classroom. When a government soldier peered down the stairs early yesterday, they shot him in the hand.
"They are hungry and they are thirsty. But they are still fighting," one solider, Mohammad Asif, confirmed. "We listened and they were speaking to each other in Urdu. We couldn't understand what they were saying . . . They are speaking right now. We are trying to kill them," he added.
Over the next three hours, I watched from the high battlements as government troops came up with increasingly ingenious strategies to finish off the last two Taliban volunteers, almost certainly Pakistani. They poured oil into their building and set light to it. They rolled grenades down the stairs. They fired shots every few minutes: to remind them, just in case they had forgotten, that death was very near indeed.
And then finally at 12.30 p.m. a genial commander, Din Mohammad, manoeuvred a six-foot rocket into a drainage chute that led directly to their subterranean hideout. The rocket fizzed orange. And then it exploded, sending a furious back-blast of dust into the surrounding trees. There was a tomb-like silence.
"We are certain that they are dead. But we will explode a few more rockets just to be sure," Din Mohammad said. "I've seen far worse battles than this," he added calmly.
Beyond the gazebo, next to where the Taliban had set up their own makeshift mortar factory, were the corpses of several well-off Arab volunteers.
Unlike their Pakistani counter-parts, dressed in flimsy salwar kameezes, the Arabs had been wearing expensive fleece jackets and trousers. A dead Talib sported a San Fransisco 49ers sweatshirt; another a zip-up Dolce and Gabbana top.
Osama bin Laden's elite fighters may have rejected the West's relativist ideology, but they felt comfortable enough to wear their enemies' clothes. After a few hours it was hard to take it all in. The dead turned up everywhere: in dense thickets of willows and autumnal poplars; in waterlogged ditches; and in storage rooms piled with ammunition boxes.
It would have taken a truly medieval imagination to have conjured up so much death; only a Bosch or a Dante could have got it right. Sitting on the balcony of his wrecked headquarters, Gen Rashid Dostum yesterday said he had lost 40 men in the battle, including three of his top commanders. Another 200 had been wounded.
He was very sad, he said. "I'm very upset that my commanders had been killed. They all had children and families . . . We tried to treat the Taliban humanely. We gave them a chance to wash and to pray. But they attacked us. We could have tied their hands and legs but we didn't," he lamented.
The man who had brokered the foreign fighters' surrender from Kunduz, the Taliban commander Mullah Fahzel, yesterday turned up to survey the damage. It is still not clear whether he had tricked the Taliban fighters into surrendering, or whether they had genuinely wanted to give up their weapons, only later to change their minds.
Strangely, the body count seems lower than the 400 prisoners who arrived at the Kalai Jangi last Saturday afternoon. There was no sign yesterday of the British SAS and American Special Forces, for whom this operation can scarcely be counted a triumph. Before the revolt began, the theory was that all the prisoners would be treated according to international law.
It didn't turn out like that: there was no trial and no jury; merely an avalanche of death from the sky. Walking away from the compound, the smell of death mixed with dust hung in the air. The mynah birds were swooping among the pine trees. I washed my hands with a bottle of water, but the smell lingered.