The lost city; a former jewel of Central Asia, now under the rule of the Northern Alliance.(Letter from Herat)

At noon on November 15th, I was in an old Toyota, on a road full of old Toyotas, having crossed the Iranian border, on the approach to Herat, in northwest Afghanistan. Two or three hours into the journey, the traffic of Toyotas, most of them carrying armed men, got thicker, and the dust they kicked up was impenetrable. The driver turned on his headlights. Low huts appeared along the road, and we guessed that we were nearing the city, but the dust made it hard to be sure. After each car passed, there was a moment of grainy blindness, and then one of clarity, once the dust was behind us. During the clear moments, I was able to see quite far into the distance and could make out a formation of low shapes, darker than the horizon. The driver saw it, too. "Herat," he said, and then we entered another dust cloud and it disappeared.

When we reemerged, the silhouette of the city was different; there were now several very tall shapes, as unexpected as a giraffe's neck on a hog's back. It took less than a second for the shapes to disappear into the next cloud of dust. I thought, Victorian factory chimneys!

As we drove on, I kept looking out for the chimneylike shapes, trying to get a better view. There were five of them, and they rearranged themselves as our perspective changed, appearing and reappearing out of the dust. They seemed to lean precariously. Every now and then, their shafts picked up the sun and gave off an obscure sparkle. Among them there was a square building -- it had a high dome, shaped like a chef's hat.

We came to a checkpoint. There was an air of bustling good humor. Three days before, the Taliban had fled Herat, after a relatively bloodless uprising by its inhabitants. A smiling Northern Alliance mujahid took my passport and examined it, upside down. Then he gave it back, and motioned for the makeshift gate to be opened. As we drove through, the men on both sides of the road waved, as if we were coming to liberate the city. Pickups swept past; in the back were men with Kalashnikovs and handheld grenade launchers. Next to the road, there was an overturned armored personnel carrier. A sign announced that the area had been cleared of mines.

I looked up at the shapes. They were not chimneys but stupendous minarets, more than a hundred feet high. I realized now what had caught the sun. White marble ran up along part of the shafts, like the torn casing of a beautiful sausage. Farther along the road, an artillery shell had made a large hole in one of the minarets, and birds were flying in and out of it. The dome I had seen was turquoise, and ribbed. But my eyes kept returning to the minarets, and to pieces of colored faience, chipped bits of glazed clay, that lay around their bases, glittering in the sun.

I was staying at the Mowafaq Hotel, in the new part of the city, and Ismail Khan was about to give a press conference nearby. Khan had been a commander of the Afghan resistance during the Soviet occupation. In 1992, four years after the Soviets left, he became the governor of Herat. In 1995, he set out to capture Kandahar, in the south, then held by the nascent Taliban -- an act of folly that led to the fall of Herat. Khan spent nearly three of the next six years in a Taliban jail. He escaped, organized his forces, and led an uprising; he was now reclaiming what he believed to be his.

The difficulty was that Khan hadn't actually liberated the city; it had dropped into his lap, and his ability to impose his rule was weaker than he would have liked. He appeared, sliding out of a spotless Pajero, wearing a cream-colored pashmina shawl, to orchestrated cries of "Hail the Emir!" During the press conference, he made a vague commitment to pluralism, but it was evident that he wasn't really interested in sharing power. He was an authoritarian ruler, people said afterward, recalling the time when he was last in power. The fear was that he'd be just as repressive now.