Tajikistan is the wettest of the Central Asian republics, with the average annual precipitation for the Kafiristan and Vakhsh valleys in the south being around, and up to in the mountains.

The conformation of the mountain districts, which comprise all the southern districts of Badakhshan and the northern hills and valleys of Nuristan ( the former Kafiristan ), is analogous to that of the rest of the Hindu Kush westwards.

Pāṇini styled the Aspa and the Aśvaka clans of the Kunar and Swat valleys ( earlier Kafiristan --- modern Nuristan ) as Aśvayanas and Aśvakayanas respectively.

Kafiristan was inhabited by a polytheistic pagan culture before en-masse conversion to Islam began in 1890s.

The first European to visit Kafiristan was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary named Benedict de Goes who mentions as place called " Capherstam " in Afghanistan visited by him in 1602 during the course of a journey from Lahore to China.

The first time was when Dost Mohammad, the Amir of Kabul, killed members of Gardner's delegation in Afghanistan forcing him to flee from Kabul to Yarkand through west Kafiristan.

The second time was when Gardner had a brief sojourn in northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley while returning from Yarkand.

Though some sub-groups such as the Kom paid tribute to Chitral, most of Kafiristan was left on the Afghan side of the frontier in 1893, when large areas of tribal lands between Afghanistan and British India were divided into zones of control by the Durand Line.

In their native rural areas, which was referred to by the local Muslims as Kafiristan before the 19th century, they are often farmers, herders, and dairymen.

The " Kafir " here is used to refer to their being non-Muslims and the Nurestan province was hence known as Kafiristan, before the majority were forcefully converted to Islam during Abdur Rahman Khan's rule around 1895.

Nuristanis were depicted as their pre-Islamic past the Kafiristanis, as one of peoples inhabiting Kafiristan in Rudyard Kipling's book called The Man Who Would Be King which was then made into a film.

It was formerly known as Kafiristan (" land of the unbelievers ") until the inhabitants were converted to Islam in 1896, and thence the region has become known as Nuristan (" Land of Light ").

Until the 1890s, the region was known as Kafiristan ( Persian for " Land of the non-believers ") because of its inhabitants: the Nuristani, an ethnically distinctive people ( numbering about 60, 000 ) who practiced animism, polytheism and shamanism.

The older name for the region was Kafiristan and the languages were termed Kafiri or Kafiristani, but the terms have been replaced by the present ones since the conversion of the region to Islam in 1896.

Kafiristan is where the bulk of Rudyard Kipling's famous story " The Man Who Would Be King " takes place.

Map of Kafiristan prior to its conversion to Islam in 1890s

Kafiristan took its name because the inhabitants of the region were non-Muslims and were thus known to the surrounding Muslim population as kafirs, meaning " infidels ".

After declining population figures because of forced conversion in the 1970s, this region of Kafiristan in Pakistan, known as Kalasha Desh, has recently shown an increase in its population.

The region is so called " Kafiristan " as the surrounding populations were converted to Islam, the people in this region retained themselves, thus known as " Kafirs ". The Arabic word " Kufr " means not only to disbelieve, but also to blaspheme, and therefore, its derivative " Kafir " means one who commits blasphemy against Allah in the Islamic tradition.

The last non-Muslim Afghans of Kafiristan north of Kabul were forcefully converted to Islam.

It is about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan.

The next day they will go off to Kafiristan to set themselves up as kings.

The Nuristani people were formally known as Kaffirs of Kafiristan before the Afghan Islamization of the region.

The word " kafir " has also been suggested to be linked to Kapiś (= Kapish ), the ancient Sanskrit name of the region that included historic Kafiristan.

Ancient Kapiśa Janapada, located south-east of the Hindukush, included and is related to Kafiristan.

The British adventurer Colonel Alexander Gardner claimed to have visited Kafiristan twice, in 1826 and 1828.

In the fighting in Kafiristan, the Afghans have captured twenty-five forts at an admitted loss of 1, 500 killed and wounded.

Soon after hostilities are resumed on the southern and eastern sides of Kafiristan, and nearly all the fertile portions are taken by the Afghan forces.

" Kafir " has also been traced to Kapiś (= Kapish ), the ancient Sanskrit name of the region that included historic Kafiristan ; which is also given as " Ki-pin " ( or Ke-pin, Ka-pin, Chi-pin ) in old Chinese chronicles.

Her design was inspired by her European ventures, especially from the Italian Renaissance gardens, and consisted of a establishing a sophisticated relationship between the architectural and natural environments, with formal terraced gardens stepping a down steep slope and transitioning to a more naturalistic aesthetic approaching the creek.

The mill consisted of 16 waterwheels in two separate rows built into a steep hillside.

Before the Johnstown Flood of 1889, Yoder Hill consisted of nothing more than a few farms, accessible by only a few steep, muddy roads.

The Russian position at Borodino consisted of a series of disconnected earthworks running in an arc from the Moskva River on the right, along its tributary, the Kolocha ( whose steep banks added to the defense ), and towards the village of Utitza on the left.

Streets and sections, parks and cemeteries had been drawn in an area that consisted of swampy delta or high hills and steep gullies.

The Schenectady Detour consisted of two connections to the West Shore Railroad, allowing through trains to bypass the steep grades at Schenectady, New York.

The path lay up a steep boulder strewn track one one side of which was a sheer drop and the other by a perpendicular cliff face, leading to the main gateway, known as the Koket-Bir, which consisted of a thick timber doors set in a stone archway.

The simplistic track consisted of a very fast straight down either side of a dual carriageway, punctuated at one end by a hairpin and at the other by a steep banking.

Much of the civilian population fled to areas of refuge inaccessible to the Mongol cavalry: high mountains in the north and east, swamps ( especially on the Puszta, around Székesfehérvár and in the west Hanság ), and older earthwork fortresses ( most of which were in a motte-and-bailey form or consisted of a mud-banked enclosure on the top of a mountain, steep natural hill or man-made hill ).

Shannon Davis 2006 View from the stairs. In the right, you can see the stair which is the end of the ( consisted of 347 steep steps ) path on the mountain Egremni ( Greek: Εγκρεμνή or Εγκρεμνοί ) is a remote beach located on the south-western coast of the Ionian island of Lefkada, north-western Greece.

The general construction of Nubian pyramids consisted of steep walls, a chapel facing East, stairway facing East, and a chamber access via the stairway.

The necropolis of Wari Kayan consisted of two clusters of hundreds of burials set closely together inside and around abandoned buildings on the steep north slope of Cerro Colorado.