Each society has its own version of and purpose for gunpowder. What has become the responsibility of great manufacturing corporations in industrial society is still relegated to the single skilled craftsman in the society of the Tajik tribe. In this film, a Tajik tribesman makes gunpowder by an ancient technique similar to that used during the time of the American Revolution. The tribesman is shown as he grinds a careful balance of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulphur in a stone mortar and stores the finished product in a moisture-proof powder horn.