2022/23: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush -- Eric Newby

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. [p. 268]

I'd encountered Newby's writing long ago, in The Last Grain Race, an account of working on a commercial sailing ship in the late 1930s. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a more traditional model of mid-20th century British travel writing. Newby and his friend Hugh Carless set out, secure in their Britishness, to climb a mountain in what is now Afghanistan. Neither has much in the way of mountaineering experience: both are restless, chafing at their employment (Newby in his family's London fashion business, Carless in the Civil Service). After a brief diversion to Wales, where some hearty barmaids teach them the basics of climbing and laugh pityingly at their haplessness, the dynamic duo are on the road to the Hindu Kush. There, they encounter a variety of more or less helpful locals, who are suprisingly tolerant of our heroes' ineptitude. Luckily, at least for the purposes of this book, Newby is very much aware of just how ill-prepared and ignorant he and Carless are, and he pokes fun at the two of them rather more than he does at their long-suffering guides and companions.

There is a breezy, self-deprecating cheerfulness to Newby's account which I found very appealing, and which reminded me of the travel-adventure books I read as a child, from my father's side of the bookshelf: Heyerdahl, Byron, Shackleton, Frater, Slocum. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush was written in the mid-1950s, in the twilight of the British Empire. Despite the attitudes with which Newby and Carless have grown up, it isn't as racist or as colonial as I'd feared. Newby respects the long and bloody history of the region, and the self-sufficiency of those who live there. He is less complimentary about their sanitary arrangements, but given that the entire party comes down with dysentery (and is reduced to using the works of John Buchan for cleanup) this is understandable.

Astonishing that two untrained climbers got so close to the summit of a mountain that had 'never been climbed', at least by Europeans: delightful that, even sick and weak, both Newby and Carless could appreciate beauty and experience euphoria. "After the half-light of the building, the light in the courtyard was blinding, incandescent; the dust in it thick and old and bitter-tasting, as if it had been swirling there for ever. We were in Afghanistan." [p. 63]

This edition contains an afterword by Carless, contextualising their expedition: "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."

NB: the Kindle edition isn't great for the maps or photos, but these can be found online.

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