A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (22 page)
Read A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Online
Authors: Eric Newby
We had been on the march for a month. We were all rather jaded; the horses were galled because the drivers were careless of them, and their ribs stood out because they had been in places only fit for mules and forded innumerable torrents filled with slippery rocks as big as footballs; the drivers had run out of tobacco and were pining for their wives; there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
for the third time; all of us suffered from a persistent dysentery. The ecstatic sensations we had experienced at a higher altitude were beginning to wear off. It was not a particularly gay party.
Thesiger’s caravan was abreast of us now, his horses lurching to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked ‘British Museum’, and black tin
trunks (like the ones my solicitors have, marked ‘Not Russel-Jones’ or ‘All Bishop of Chichester’).
The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for Central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter.
‘Turn round,’ he said, ‘you’ll stay the night with us. We’re going to kill some chickens.’
We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul, that we wanted our mail, but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village.
Soon we were sitting on a carpet under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger’s belongings piled up behind us.
‘Can’t speak a word of the language,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it’s not really necessary. Here, you,’ he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. ‘Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice – three chickens.’
‘No good bothering the interpreter,’ he went on, ‘the poor
fellow’s got a sty, that’s why we only did seventeen miles today. It’s no good doing too much at first, especially as he’s not feeling well.’
The chickens were produced. They were very old; in the half-light they looked like pterodactyls.
‘Are they expensive?’
‘The Power of Britain never grows less,’ said the headman, lying superbly.
‘That means they are very expensive,’ said the interpreter, rousing himself.
Soon the cook was back, semaphoring desperately.
‘Speak up, can’t understand a thing. You want sugar? Why don’t you say so?’ He produced a large bunch of keys, like a housekeeper in some stately home. All that evening he was opening and shutting boxes so that I had tantalizing glimpses of the contents of an explorer’s luggage – a telescope, a string vest, the
Charterhouse of Parma
,
Du Côté de Chez Swann
, some fish-hooks and the 1/1000000 map of Afghanistan – not like mine, a sodden pulp, but neatly dissected, mounted between marbled boards.
‘That cook’s going to die,’ said Thesiger; ‘hasn’t got a coat and look at his feet. We’re nine thousand feet if we’re an inch here. How high’s the Chamar Pass?’ We told him 16,000 feet. ‘Get yourself a coat and boots, do you hear?’ he shouted in the direction of the camp fire.
After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious. Famished, we wrestled with the bones in the darkness.
‘England’s going to pot,’ said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter’s King Size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. ‘Look at this shirt, I’ve only had it three years, now it’s splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas
– wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.’
He began to tell me about his Arabs.
‘I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing.’ I asked him about surgery. ‘I take off fingers and there’s a lot of surgery to be done; they’re frightened of their own doctors because they’re not clean.’
‘Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?’
‘Hundreds of them,’ he said dreamily, for it was very late. ‘Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.
‘Let’s turn in,’ he said.
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger.
1.
This was nonsense. They all looked like Rajputs, and are – descendants of the Keruch Rajputs of the Indus Valley.
BY HUGH CARLESS
Well, what became of us ‘couple of pansies’ and our three Tajik companions? The short answer is that early next morning we took leave of Wilfred Thesiger and hurried down the Panjshir valley to Jangalak. Abdul Ghiyas had ridden ahead to warn his family to prepare tea and food. They gave us a memorable meal, served in the same cool green riverside garden where we had begun our journey in the Hindu Kush some weeks before. Each man had his own pot of tea and was handed a plate of eggs together with a round of delicious flat bread which had been fried in precious butter. To follow came a basket filled with the last of the season’s mulberries, cooled and cleaned by dipping in the swift-flowing river. After lunch the paying-off ceremony, the counting of dozens of bank notes, was conducted in view of a fascinated crowd who had gathered in the garden. Then we said farewell to companions who had by now become our friends.
Back in Kabul we discovered how much weight we had lost. The British ambassador, Dan Lascelles,
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kindly invited us to lunch. But he cannot have imagined the ravenous appetites which gripped us. The first course was rissoles. We wolfed them down and could
not help glancing round for more. There were none to be had! But the Goan cook saved the day by sending in a dish of steaming rice. Lascelles, a scholarly bachelor, was fascinated to hear about the rock inscriptions we had been shown in the Ramgul valley. In which languages were they carved? To our regret we had not found the energy to examine or even photograph them as they were high up on a sheer rock face and under a midday sun.
Eric flew back to Europe on the new Aeroflot service which had just been inaugurated between Moscow and Kabul. He wrote to me that ‘We crossed a very diminished Hindu Kush, breathing through oxygen masks (very funny this seemed)’. This extension of Russian influence through Aeroflot was to prove to be a portent of the Soviet attempt, made from 1979 to 1989 during the final years of their empire, to occupy Afghanistan by force and to press it into a communist mould.
As for me, I began a seven-day drive alone over unpaved roads to Tehran via the northern route and Herat. After crossing the Shibar pass over the Hindu Kush I stopped at a tea house. The owner questioned me in a friendly way about my journey and decided I needed a fellow driver. Supposing I was robbed by bandits or had a breakdown, he exclaimed. Twenty minutes later he had produced Mustafa, who seemed middle-aged and had a caste in one eye. He told me how much to pay him and, as we set off, he called out to Mustafa: ‘Take care, no treachery.’ Happily, Mustafa turned out to be another good companion.
Long before I met Eric Newby, I had heard about him from Paul Rolo. When WW2 broke out in 1939, Paul, just graduated from Oxford, had enlisted in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Eric, just returned from sailing to Australia and back on a windjammer,
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had volunteered for the London Scottish. In summer 1940, the two met at the Royal Military College,
Sandhurst as cadets on the first course held there for wartime officers and ‘temporary gentlemen’. This saw the start of a lifelong friendship between them and, later, their families.
In 1945, when the war in Europe ended, Paul was a major on the General Staff and I was posted from a Scottish infantry battalion
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to work under his direction at 8 Corps headquarters which were then at Ploen in Holstein. It was there that I began to hear some of Paul’s anecdotes about Eric. At Sandhurst Eric had been an outstanding cadet; in Egypt he had joined the Special Boat Section; then he had been taken prisoner of war after raiding a German airfield in Sicily; and, having survived three years in prison camps in Italy and Germany, he had been awarded the Military Cross and enabled to return to Italy. There he had in 1946 married Wanda Skof, the girl of Slovene origin who had helped him make a break from a camp near Parma.
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In 1946, when Paul was demobilized, he returned to Oxford as a history don at Balliol College. In due course he was to marry my sister and become a Professor of History at Keele University. In his bachelor days, Paul delighted in arranging walking tours. One winter weekend in 1949, he persuaded Eric and me to walk with him along the snow-covered South Downs.
My next memory of Eric is of watching the Coronation procession with him in 1953. He had begun to write his first book, while I had just returned from two years at the British Embassy in Kabul as Oriental Secretary (this resonant title, which has now fallen into disuse, disguised the fact that I was the Third Secretary on probation). He seemed as fascinated to hear about my travels in Afghanistan as I was to learn of his adventures in rounding Cape Horn under sail. The seed of the idea that we might go on a journey together must have been sown on that spring day when the dramatic news arrived that a British-led team had reached the summit of Everest. Three years later, the
chance came. Secker and Warburg were about to publish
The Last Grain Race
and had offered Eric an advance to write a travel book. Simultaneously, the Foreign Office posted me to the British Embassy in Tehran.
Eric was then thirty-seven. His relatively late development as a writer may have been due to the fact that at school he failed to pass exams in maths, so his father took him away at the age of sixteen. But he had been an omnivorous reader, and he may have hoped to go to college one day. Then came WW2 and his six years in the army. His first prisoner of war camp, PG 21 near Pescara, he described as seeming more like a university than a prison. Plays and concerts were performed there while the inmates could attend lectures on such varied subjects as philosophy and law by Oxbridge dons or on cricket by the Nottinghamshire and England fast bowler Bill Voce. It was there, he was to record,
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that he gained an intuition that his calling might be as a writer although he could not understand this clearly until fifteen years later when
The Last Grain Race
had received favourable notice and he had gained the support of a publisher.
In 1943 Eric had been transferred to PG 49 at Fontanellato near Parma. There he shared a dormitory with twenty others including Tony Davies,
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who later wrote that Eric Newby ‘had an irresponsible sense of humour, a delightful and witty personality, and quite the best physique I have seen on any man’. In July 1943, at the time of the Italian armistice, the British prisoners were released by the Italians. Eric, who had broken his ankle, could not move far but, befriended by Wanda, he laboured for several months on a mountain farm until he was recaptured by the Fascists.
After leaving the army in 1946, came a contrast in a life of adventure: Eric loyally served for almost a decade in Lane and Newby, his parents’ struggling firm making ladies’ dresses. By 1957, when he realized he could probably earn his living as a writer, he
had already published
The Last Grain Race
(1956) and he was writing what was to become
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
(1958). In addition, he had stored away within his own experience the raw material for two other books. These became
Something Wholesale
(1962), about the ‘rag trade’, and his story about wartime escape and romance,
Love and War in the Apennines
(1971). Together, these four books are generally regarded as his outstanding contribution to late twentieth century literature. Of the four,
A Short Walk
has become pre-eminent.
On its website, the
National Geographic
of Washington DC has an eight-page section headed ‘Extreme Classics: The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time’. Of these, fifty are American, thirty British and twenty other European. The first title is
The Worst Journey in the World
(1922) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard; the second
Journals
(1814) by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the explorers who crossed the American West to the Pacific; the tenth
Travels
(1298) by Marco Polo, while Peter Fleming’s
News from Tartary
(1936) comes in sixty-fourth. Where might you expect Eric Newby’s
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
to appear? Lists are liable to change but at present it takes its place at sixteenth. How has it reached this high position, almost rubbing shoulders with the matchless Marco Polo?
There would seem to be two main reasons. First, it is a finely crafted book, eminently readable, tuned to the spirit of the age and full of wit and humour. The humour is essentially ironic and understated, like the title of the book, and in the spirit of amateur endeavour. The teasing tone in which Eric portrays me and sometimes others is affectionate if occasionally exasperated. Through the self-deprecating language which he adopts, he manages to turn our failure to reach the summit of Mir Samir into something of a triumph because his story is about the way we travelled rather
than what we achieved. This, for many readers, has been part of the enduring charm of the book.
