Having concentrated the greater number of their guns to bear upon one point of the road in front of a mud-walled village, the enemy suddenly opened fire on the leading battalions of sepoys, causing them to give way.

At Sangesar, a mud-walled village 25 miles west of Kandahar, Mullah Omar operated a mosque and a madrassa, or religious school, until 1994, when he and his student followers left to seize Kandahar.

We travelled through the scorched aridness of the Scinde desert, lived in the Himalayas facing the peaks of snow, saw cities and mud-walled villages.

At that time on earth, the first mud-walled villages had not yet been built, nor the first patch of grain sown to turn man from a wandering hunter to the householder, the landowner.

Most Yemenis, 80 percent of whom are illiterate, live in remote, mud-walled villages, where witchcraft and superstition are used to ward off illness and the spiritual world often seems more potent than the profane.

These lives, tucked away in the mango groves, grand estates and mud-walled villages of rural Pakistan, are rarely seen by outsiders.

"Taliban, nyet," said a bearded alliance fighter among the hundreds of soldiers grouped just shy of a mud-walled village, which they expected to be turned over.

Then, just as the truck neared the end of its journey, a light rain lifted and a rainbow spread across the sky, arcing directly over this mud-walled village, where Mr. Gul's ancestors dwelled for generations until Soviet forces invaded in December 1979.

Flying in a south-north line, three Chinooks skimmed over mud-walled villages, drawing stares from farmers, waves from excited children, scurrying from bands of sheep and indifference from camels.

She had tried to deliver the baby at home in her mud-walled village, but her labor had stalled; now she is frightened and in pain.