Villagers and their donkeys climbed the hills of Tora Bora looking for firewood to sell and homes to salvage as U.S. special forces returned empty-handed from their hunt for Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites ).
Life may be returning to normal in these remote and barren hills, where a few hardy villagers live and which no one had heard of until this month when bin Laden was suspected to be hiding out in caves carved into the hillsides.
Heading down from the rugged canyons in this corner of eastern Afghanistan ( news - web sites ) near the border with Pakistan was a pickup truck filled with U.S. soldiers.
The special forces who have secretly spearheaded much of the ground offensive in Afghanistan since October 7 were tight-lipped as ever about their search for the man the United States has accused of being the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
Also on the road down the hill was a tank crowded with Afghan anti-Taliban mujahideen -- or holy warriors -- also heading away from the front and apparently confident their job was done.
The hundreds of fighters of bin Laden's al Qaeda movement who were said to have been holed up in the mountain redoubts of Tora Bora were either dead, captured or on the run.
And while the military traffic moved downhill, Afghans with donkeys were moving up into the White Mountains which, until recently, were the scene of blistering U.S. bombing raids.
In a once wooded area, now devastated and turned into a moonscape by U.S. bombs, villagers hacked out the stumps of trees felled by the explosives and loaded them on their onto their donkeys for firewood.
Further up, nearer the cave complex that provided a retreat for al Qaeda, and possibly even for bin Laden, the extent of the bomb damage was even greater.
A huge crater lined with timber, bricks and stones, lay just feet away from an al Qaeda tank. The tank itself appeared not to have been hit directly but partly destroyed by the force of the blast alone, a mute testimony to the awesome destructive power of the U.S. bombardment.
Afghans surrounded some craters, picking through twisted metal and incongruous household debris such as pots and shoes despite warnings of mines and unexploded ordnance in the area.
"Al Qaeda finished," one cried triumphantly in English.
Behind him, the wooded hills rising clearly to snow-capped peaks, were strikingly beautiful in the brilliant December sunshine -- a far cry from the thundering rain of bombs over the last three weeks, which have turned them into a graveyard for a still unknown number of al Qaeda fighters.
Tuesday, the skies were quiet.