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Afghans pray on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on Wednesday in Kabul, Afghanistan. Muslims all over the world are supposed to go without food, drink, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan in order to purify themselves and concentrate their mind on Islamic teachings.

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Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge. The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.
The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes.

Indeed, driving on the Kabul Gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a complicated dance of beauty and death. The fighting with the Taliban lasts only for a day or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, who owns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looks directly out onto the highway. “It’s a kind of theater. Sometimes, a car will fly by in the air.”

The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for the laws of physics. The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly perpendicular line. A foot-high ledge guards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 1,000 feet down.

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