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It is awe-inspiring to walk through a home built 4,500 years ago.
Especially one still very much recognisable as a house today, with front and back entrances, interconnecting rooms, neat fired brick walls - even a basic toilet and sewage outlet. Astonishingly, given its age, the home in question was also built on two storeys.
But it is even more impressive to walk outside into a real Bronze Age street, and see all of the other homes lining it. And to walk the length of it, seeing the precise lanes running off it before reaching a grand, ancient marketplace.
This is the marvel of Mohenjo Daro, one of the earliest cities in the world.
In its day, about 2600 BC, its complex planning, incredible architecture, and complex water and sewage systems made it one of the most advanced urban settings anywhere. It was a city thought to have housed up to 35,000 inhabitants of the great Indus civilisation.
While I was overwhelmed by the scale and wonderment of it all, my eminent guide to the site was almost in tears of despair.
"Every time I come here, I feel worse than the previous time," says Dr Asma Ibrahim, one of Pakistan's most accomplished archaeologists. "I haven't been back for two or three years," she says. "The losses since then are so immense and it breaks my heart."
In the lower town of Mohenjo Daro, where the middle and working classes once lived, the walls are crumbling from the base upwards. This is new damage.
The salt content of the ground water is eating away at the bricks that, before excavation, had survived thousands of years.
As we move to the upper town where the elite of the Indus civilization would have lived, and where some of the signature sites like the large public bath lie, it appears even worse.
"It is definitely a complicated site to protect, given the problems of salinity, humidity and rainfall," says Dr Ibrahim. "But most of the attempts at conservation by the authorities have been so bad and so amateur they have only accelerated the damage."
One method used has been to cover all the brickwork across the vast site with mud slurry, in the hope the mud will absorb the salt and moisture. But where the mud has dried and crumbled, it has taken with it fragments of ancient brick, and the decay goes on underneath.
"We have to do something soon, because if things carry on like this, the site will not last more than 20 years," says Dr Ibrahim.
The government of Pakistan was in charge of Mohenjo Daro for decades, but recently responsibility was handed over to the provincial authorities in Sindh. They have now set up a technical committee to rescue the site.
It is a sign of the desperation of those who love Mohenjo Daro, and who are pained to see a city that once rivalled sites of its contemporary civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, losing its glory in this undignified way.
Thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link. For more, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18491900.
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