First You Build a Wall

This was about as high as got, after we cleared the mountains; the land dropped below us and we didn't immediately adjust altitude.  This is something you see nearly everywhere here with Afghan rural residences.  First, you build the wall.  You always see these painstakingly laid out rectangles where the family compound will eventually be.  People build the walls before they even have the building materials or the money for the house.  So you find these empty rectangles lined by mud walls all over the country.  In the case of this village, given the complete absence of any buildings and the fact that there was nothing anywhere near it, I don't think it's a new settlement; I think it's an abandoned one.  The river bed looks completely dried out and filled with stones, too, so agricultural failure may have driven the entire village to re-locate.