A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Eric Newby’s bid to become the first European since the 1880s to set foot in the remote ‘Country of Light’ in Afghanistan began with a fateful exchange of telegrams: ‘Can you travel Nuristan June?’ ‘Of course, Hugh’. Newby was working as a salesman in haute couture in London; Hugh Carless was a junior diplomat in Rio de Janeiro. A more unlikely pair of explorers would be hard to find. Nevertheless they laid their plans, collected a vast quantity of equipment and a car with which to drive through Anatolia and Iran to reach Afghanistan, and applied for funding to attempt the impressive Mir Samir mountain. Apart from a four-day crash course in Wales, neither had any experience in climbing – they would learn as they went.

Eric Newby is the perfect travel writer. The epitome of the self-deprecating Englishman, he makes us feel each blister and flea-bite he suffers and yet roar with laughter at every mishap and adventure, from the villainous garage mechanic who propositions them (‘Carharless my soul, you will transport me to Englestan?’), to Shir Muhammad having to button their trousers because their hands are too damaged from climbing. Yet the narrative is also one of the most sensitive evocations of a beautiful, timeless landscape. Unforgettable images transport the reader to the remoter reaches of Afghanistan: ibex horns balanced on the tomb of a hunter; apricots freshly washed in the river and handed up by a grinning boy; a Russian samovar boiling in a tiny garden; and, of course, Mir Samir mountain, its summit surrounded by the incredible beauty – and danger – of the glaciers. Travelling amongst fiercely independent tribespeople in wildly inaccessible territory, Newby experiences a region and a way of life that have since been catapulted into prominence in world affairs. He memorably reflects as he stands in ‘one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the earth breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.’ In a newly commissioned introduction, author and actor Richard E. Grant testifies to the book’s enduring beauty and charm.