A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  Back in Kabul we discovered how much weight we had lost. The British ambassador, Dan Lascelles,1 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,2 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 battalion3 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.4

  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,5 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,6 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.

  It also gives an impressionistic picture of life some fifty years ago in two adjacent but quite different valleys of the Hindu Kush (Indian Killer) range; a range named after the captives taken on the plains of India who perished while crossing the passes on their way to the slave markets of Central Asia. In addition, the book has a brilliant ending which describes our chance encounter with Thesiger, a historic figure from the golden age of exploration.

  The second reason must lie in the train of catastrophic events, once barely imaginable, which have projected Afghanistan on to the world sta
ge during the last four decades. In the 1960s, when mass tourism began to gather pace, the country had acted as a peaceful staging post for many thousands of young people on the overland route to India. But the 1970s witnessed a republican revolution which slithered into communism and Soviet occupation, thus turning Afghanistan into a battle ground of the Cold War. In the wake of the Russian withdrawal came an ethnic civil war, the rise of the mainly Pushtun Taliban, the emergence of al-Qa’eda and 9/11/2001. Today, NATO forces have for some years been engaged there in the struggle against militant Islamists. These events have all helped to maintain the rise in status of an already merit-worthy book.

  When A Short Walk was published in 1958 it was well received, particularly by other writers. Evelyn Waugh agreed to write his perceptive foreword while Peter Fleming invited Eric and me to dine with him and Ella Maillart, the Swiss sportswoman and writer who had travelled with him from China to India in 1935.

  The continuing success of the book was to bring us other invitations. In the early 1970s Cooks, the travel agency, asked us to lead the first trekking tour for mountain walkers in Afghanistan. They were already running such tours successfully in Nepal. It was to begin and end at Bamian in the central highlands and go up the beautiful Ajar valley where the river was said to be brimming with trout. But then a famine was reported and this was followed by the republican coup when King Zaher was deposed. Cooks abandoned the project.

  In the late 1990s we were to have returned to Afghanistan to make a film for BBC television. The difficulty was that the Taleban controlled most of the country. However, we could fly on a UN plane to Faizabad in Badakhshan in the north-east where Merlin, the British medical charity,7 had a team of doctors and nurses. The founder and then director of Merlin, Dr Christopher Besse, even offered to come with the Newbys and me as our personal physician. But in summer 1998 the Taleban recaptured Mazar-i Sharif, the main town in the north, and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. The BBC decided that the project would be too difficult and too dangerous.8 Thus, our hopes of returning to Afghanistan together were twice frustrated by events.

  Looking back on our journey into the Hindu Kush in 1956 my reflections centre on the good fortune we enjoyed.9 Afghanistan was then cocooned in a rare period of peace and stability which lasted for some forty years until roughly 1973. This allowed our small expedition to go forward without let or hindrance. We got on well with our three sturdy Tajik companions, who spoke the Persian dialect now known as Dari; and we were glad to have with us as a guide and counsellor their leader Abdul Ghiyas. He seemed to have friends everywhere. One of them was Abdul Rahim, who caught the young snowcock at 16,000 feet near the foot of Mir Samir.

  Abdul Ghiyas had a certain discipline. Say we agreed with him the need to make an early start the next day: he would be up by three, have said his early prayers, lit a fire and boiled water for the tea by three thirty when he would rouse us. The horses would then be loaded and by four he would have the show on the road. This was a magic hour. The valleys would remain in deep shadow while the rays of the eastern sun cast their light around the topmost peaks. For a time the air would remain cool and still but by eight or nine o’clock both men and horses would be ready for a halt. Abdul Ghiyas would then preside over making the tea. He would fashion a fireplace with a few stones, Shir Muhammad would provide dried horse dung and the rest of us would bring the dead roots and branches of artemisia, the low sage brush, which grew widely. Then the comedy would begin.

  We would all gather round, longing impatiently for the first restoring sips of tea. Someone would enquire: ‘Ao jush mikonad, Abdul Ghiyas?’ (‘Is the water boiling?’). A moment later another would venture: ‘Mijushad?’ (‘Is it boiling?’). The answer to such cheek might be the favourite Afghan expression for the negative: a forward tilt of the chin together with a smack of the lips against the tongue. At last the water would be on the ‘jush’, Abdul Ghiyas would then reach into his capacious waistcoat, extract a pouch of tea, tip a small measure onto the palm of one hand and pour it into our blackened kettle. Sugar, a luxury in the Panjshir, would be reserved for red-letter days.

  Without the agreement of Abdul Ghiyas, we would have never been able to cross the Chomar Pass into Nuristan. He could, without much exaggeration, have claimed that the road was impossible for horses. The others would have supported him. Even with his acquiescence, it was with some anxiety that we followed the barely visible track leading up to and over the pass into the Ramgul valley. Would we find a land of milk and honey or disturb a hornets’ nest?

  Of course we found neither. The isolated Ramgul was a world apart from the well-trodden Panjshir. Its inhabitants spoke an ancient language called Kati, favoured homespun clothing, and were intensely suspicious of strangers, whether Afghan or other. This was hardly surprising as it was only within living memory that they had been subdued and forcibly converted to Islam by the Amir Abdul Rahman. One of the questions they plied us with was whether we were Nikolai? This must have been a reference to contacts which they had had formerly with traders from Tsarist Russia, possibly dealers who had sold them rifles.

  We were fascinated to visit the Ramgul, a valley of Nuristan which had remained little known to the outside world. Had we failed to get there, this would have compounded our other failure, through inexperience, to reach the summit of Mir Samir.10 As it was, when we crossed the Arayu pass back into the friendly Panjshir, we felt some admiration for the rugged Nuristani way of life but also relief that no serious mishap had befallen us.

  When Soviet forces occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Panjshir valley became one of the leading centres of resistance. Under their legendary leader, Ahmad Shah Masud, the Tajiks withstood numerous attacks by the Red Army and today rusting Soviet tanks remain there as evidence. Later, this resistance spread to neighbouring provinces. It was sustained, at least in some part, by the export of lapis lazuli from the famous mine at Sar-i Sang in Badakhshan. The lapis was carried by caravans of pack horses across Nuristan to Chitral and the outside world. The horses returned with supplies.11

  The Soviet withdrawal was followed by a civil war in which ethnic ambitions were at times supported by foreign interests. In the mid-1990s, the Pushtun Taleban slowly extended their control over the main towns, only leaving a few corners of the country in the hands of the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras). But then came 9/11 with the United States tilting the balance of power against al-Qa’eda and the Taleban. Sadly, Masud was assassinated by al-Qa’eda in 2001, but our three companions from 1956 managed to survive the wars. In 2007 Badar Khan, who lived at Jangalak, played a part in the BBC television film about Eric as a travel writer made by Icon films.12

  Two or three years ago I asked Eric which of the books he had written was his favourite. I had half expected him to reply that it was his first book, The Last Grain Race, which had been about his first great adventure and had also fostered the largest number of different editions; or perhaps Love and War in the Apennines, which has already appeared as an excellent film.13 But he answered A Short Walk, and said that sometimes, when he felt depressed, he would open his copy and read either the first or the last chapter. And then, he added, he would feel much better. I sometimes feel the same.

  HUGH CARLESS

  AUGUST 2008

  Plates

  Novices on the Milestone Buttress, Snowdonia, May 1956.

  Page from the author’s manuscript: Mir Samir.

  Hugh Carless in the pilgrims’ photo booth; Meshed, Iran.

  Camp on the ibex trail: hard lying on shattered rock.

  On Mir Samir, a steep pitch.

  Crossing the Chamar Pass; Shir Muhammad with the chestnut and Badar (Baha_dar) Khan with his white.

  Eric with some of the elders in Pushal. Second from the right is the ‘company promoter’.

  Stone houses with timber frames, Ramgul Valley.

  The Ramgul Valley looking south towards Lake Mundul.

  The proud owner of a prize fighting partridge in
the Ramgul.

  Wilfred Thesiger at sunup, Panjshir Valley.

  Portrait of two failures.

  Notes

  1. Lascelles was British Ambassador to Ethiopia 1949–51, to Afghanistan 1953–57 and, as Sir Daniel, to Japan 1957–59.

  2. The Moshulu, a four-masted Finnish-registered barque, was one of the ten sailing vessels owned by Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn in the Aaland Islands which took part in the grain race from Australia to Europe in 1939. Moshulu, laden with Australian wheat, won in the time of ninety-one days. The language used on board was Swedish.

  3. 6 RSF, 15 (Scottish) Division.

  4. Wanda Newby wrote an engaging account of her early life in Slovenia, then a province of Italy, and her wartime years near Parma in War and Peace: Growing up in Fascist Italy (London, Collins, 1991). Marrying Eric in 1946, she lived with him happily for over sixty years.