Sayeed Qiana used to have a job, an important job he thought, or at least one that he loved. To call him a guard would not be exactly right. For three years, Sayeed look after the Great Buddhas, the massive sculptures carved in the sandstone cliffs at Bamiyan. He also tended the flowers there, the geraniums and roses planted nearby.
Now Sayeed can only give us a sad tour of the destruction which humans are capable of. As we walk through the rubble, stepping over remains of live ordnance and crushed rock, Sayeed points to a boulder or a stone.
"That was the shoulder," he says, or "there is a foot." It seems as though he can name every stone, every mound of debris. He was intimate with these ancient wonders and it as though they still exist in his mind's eye.
In one of their its last acts of frenzied violence, the Taliban last year set about the business of destroying the Great Buddhas. Resisting the entreaties of nations and religious leaders across the world, the Taliban insisted that the statues were "unIslamic" and blew them up.
This was not at easy task here in the homeland of the Hazaras, Afghanistan's minority ethnic group for which the Taliban held no love. Bamiyan itself is the capital of Bamiyan province, a small village in the heart of the Hindu Kush.
The Buddhas were constructed during the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. The large Buddha stood 55 metres high or 180 feet, the smaller female stood 38 meters or 125 feet. Each was carved into the face of the cliff and set back within it.
Originally, they were painted red and blue. The hands and feet were painted in hues which suggested they were gilded. The Chinese traveller Hsuan-Tsang wrote: "The golden hues sparkle on every side and its precious ornaments dazzle the eye by their brightness."
The entire mountain was a wonder. What we now simply call caves are an elaborate labyrinth of rooms, grottos, vestibules, sanctuaries and monastic cells which were built into the mountain, complete with hidden stairways and interlocking passageways.
Bamiyan was a holy place; where the Buddhas stood were adorned with iconic images, women holding billowing scarves to represent the winds of sunrise and sunset, two half-bird half-human sirens representing the deities who direct celestial music.
The Great Buddha, scholars tell us, was meant to represent the Cosmic Buddha which evolved from the sun to illuminate the world with understanding.
That message of understanding mellowed many invaders through the centuries, including the Huns, but the buck stopped at the Taliban. Sayeed describes what happened.
"Four days before they announced they would destroy the Buddhas. Then they came and took eight men from the village. They forced them to work planting the dynamite," he said.
The Taliban made the men tie ropes around their waists and hoisted them up on scaffolding to strategically place the dynamite and other explosives in the mountain. "There were seven bombs placed along the bottom," Sayeed says. We are walking around the area where the Great Buddha's right foot was. "Our people didn't want to do this but they were so frightened. Two of the eight men died. Their hearts just stopped," said Sayeed.
The plan of destruction took 27 days. The explosives were detonated at 10 in the morning, so powerful that windows were blown out in the village 3 km away.
Sayeed stares at the sandstone and seems to see what is no longer there.
"Those black holes, those were the arms," he says. "And the doves are gone. The white doves used to come here, but now there is only one. Maybe we will see it today."
We walk a quarter of a mile to the place where the female Buddha stood. "It was so beautiful, beautiful like a girl," Sayeed says.
We walk to the caves, actually rooms which once contained wall painting and frescoes which depicted figures sitting in prayer and dancing in celebration.
During the 20 years of Afghanistan's war, the frescoes were gradually cut away by looters, taken away in chunks for sale in the antique shops of Peshawar. Now the walls are bare, with patchy remnants of what once was.
These one-time archaeological treasures now serve a more practical purpose. In tiny, smoke-blackened caves which would be under the national protection of archeologists in any other place, 150 of Bamiyan's poorest families are now struggling to live through the winter. The snow is already here and temperatures are dropping.
The people of Bamiyan are among Afghanistan's most desperate. This is a remote and inaccessible area, difficult to reach even for the many aid agencies struggling to bring food here for the winter.
It is a 10-hour drive from Kabul through some of the most magnificent and forboding landscape imaginable; picture God and Picasso having an argument - an unresolved one at that - and you might see the towering cliffs littered with cubist boulders the size of three-storey homes.
Louis Dupree wrote: "To call the mountain systems of Afghanistan tortured is not trite but concise."
Nasiba is 35 years old and lives with her husband and five children in one of these rooms. Here then is a list of its contents: one wood stove, an oil lamp, seven lumpy floor mats and blankets, three pots, one metal kettle, one bucket and a single bag of potatoes.
I do not abbreviate this inventory for purposes of space. This is all they have in the world.
Nasiba is bright and talkative, dressed in the brightly coloured shawls which typify the Hazaras. "This winter is very bad because we do not have wood for the fires and there is no food. Other years we spent the summer and before collecting things, but because of the Taliban we couldn't. I am so glad they are gone."
We discuss her hopes to get more blankets and food from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We discuss her two children who died last year when the Taliban forced them from the area in the dead of winter over a forbidding mountain pass.
And then, strangely - strangely because I am having this discussion with a woman who lives in a cave - we discuss politics.
"We heard about September 11th and what Osama did. We began praying that this time it would be the end of the Taliban."
After an overnight stay in this village, a place where electricity and running water do not exist, we head back to Kabul, our driver carefully navigating narrow icy roads which hug the cliff of the 10,880-ft Shibar Pass.
The only sound is the clack-clack of my translator HarounΓs fingering of his prayer beads. Just before we left Bamiyan, Sayeed excitedly pointed to something high in the corner of where the female Buddha stood.
"Look, there she is!" he said.
I could see nothing, and besides I thought he might be caught in memory. To be polite I started to nod vaguely when I realised what he was seeing. It was the single white dove. She had returned.