On 29 July 2010, as the book went to press, Marshal Mauro Gigli, a very experienced bomb-disposal expert with whom the author had travelled, died in Herat. "The colours of the markets of Kabul: pyramids of brown potatoes like the mountains of the Hindu Kush in front of expanses of red spice. The ancestral beauty of buildings of mud and straw, a daily life of children and markets, cars and lorries, tells the desperate vitality of a country trying to rise from the ashes of thirty years of war, a daily life still made of helicopters, landmines and bombings. If you are a boy in Kabul you must choose: policeman for 100 dollars a month, soldier for 120, a warlord’s pay, or 60 dollars as a bricklayer; or become an insurgent; or leave Afghanistan for ever, cross the mountains into Pakistan and try, as an illegal migrant, to reach Europe."