A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  We wrapped him in a blanket, put a big shell dressing on the maw where his nose had been, stopped the bleeding from the back of his head and wondered what to do next. We dared not move him off the road because we had no idea what internal injuries he had, nor could we give him morphia because it seemed certain that his brain must have been injured.

  Now the men of the tribe came running, attracted by the lights. They were followed by the children and then by the women. With the women came the man’s wife, a windswept black-haired creature of about thirty, who flung herself down in the dust with a jangling of gold ornaments and set up a great wailing. The rest stood in a half-circle in the light of the headlamps and looked at us silently.

  At the same moment a jeep arrived, full of soldiers. One of them was a doctor who spoke English. It seemed a miracle.

  He lifted the shell dressing and winced. Then he saw the great blue swelling, now growing bigger.

  ‘You must take him to the camp.’ (There was a military camp five miles back on the road.)

  ‘But if he’s moved he may die.’

  ‘He is going to die. You see that’ – he pointed at the bulge – ‘haemorrhage. He may live till morning. He is strong old man but there is nothing to do.’

  ‘You will come with us?’

  ‘I am going to—’ (He named a place none of us had ever heard of.) ‘It is you must take him.’

  We told him that we were going to Persia. Still we did not realize our predicament.

  Then it came, like a bombshell.

  ‘YOU CANNOT KILL MAN AND GO AWAY. THERE WILL BE INQUIRY.’

  ‘BUT WE DIDN’T. WE FOUND HIM. LOOK HERE.’ We showed him the tyre marks. They ended about seven feet from the body.

  ‘To do such damage you must travel fast.’ He pointed to the crushed offside wing, legacy of Hugh’s encounter with a London taxi. ‘But do not worry, he is only nomad. I am sorry for you.’

  His men helped us place the wounded man in the back seat. When he had gone we realized that we didn’t know his name.

  At the camp, a few huts under the mountain, there was no doctor. Nor could anyone speak Persian, French or German – only Turkish.

  ‘Bayazid, Bayazid,’ was all they could say, waving us on. With the groans of the old man in our ears and the heartrending cries of his wife from the back seat where she supported him, we drove the fifteen miles to the town.

  All night we sat under the electric light in the corridor of the military hospital, smoking cigarettes, dozing, going into the room where he was, to listen to his breathing as it became louder and louder. He died horribly, early the next morning on a canvas stretcher just as it was growing light, surrounded by judges and prosecutors and interpreters screaming at him, trying to find out what had run him down, the members of his family elbowed out by official observers.

  As soon as the man was dead, the nightmare of the day began. In a convoy of vehicles we returned to the scene of the accident. In ours was a Judge, who seemed hostile; a young Public Prosecutor, who didn’t; a tall Colonel with a broken nose, hard as nails like a Liverpool policeman; a Captain, who was indifferent, neither unamiable nor amiable – nothing; an interpreter, who looked as though he had been routed out of a house of ill-fame, who spoke extraordinarily bad Levantine French of a purely declamatory kind; a number of really smelly policemen and two or three soldiers. Apart from the Interpreter, the Prosecutor spoke a few words of French but tried hard with them; the Captain not more than a dozen words of English but he was useless. All the rest spoke nothing but their native tongue. By a paradox it was the Prosecutor who seemed to offer the greatest hope. Worst of all was the Interpreter, who seemed intent on destroying us.

  ‘Vous êtes Carless?’ he inquired sardonically as I was getting into the car to drive to the place of the accident. With all the more important officials in our car, which had been emptied of luggage in order to transport them, it seemed better that Hugh shouldn’t drive.

  ‘Non, M’sieur.’

  ‘Il faut que M. Carless conduit l’automobile.’

  ‘Pourquoi?’

  ‘M. le Juge l’a dit.’

  All the way to the scene of the accident they watched Hugh like a hawk. It looked very bad for him. There on the gravel road was the long swerving mark of the skid ending practically where the body had been. The space between was already ploughed up by countless footmarks, but if we had hit the old man, the force of the blow would have thrown his body almost precisely into the position in which we found it.

  The interrogation went on right through the baking noonday heat until evening. Half a dozen times we were made to re-enact the accident; the road was measured; the nomad children were made to collect stones to mark the key points; drawings were made; statements were taken. All we could say was that we had found him and that there had been no other witnesses – the nearest nomads had been nearly a mile from the road. It was not our fault, we said, you must believe us. But then there were the men of the tribe committing perjury, describing the accident, offering flowers to the Judge; while the Interpreter, sensing the dislike that we were trying so hard to conceal, redoubled his own efforts to destroy us by garbling everything we said. Worst of all they told us that ours was the only vehicle travelling towards the Customs House from the Turkish side on the evening of the accident.

  Hugh was in a spot. The only hope seemed to be the Prosecutor, who had ordered the beating of several members of the tribe. ‘They are lying,’ he said, as he watched the policeman thumping them in the incandescent heat. ‘I am only interested in the truth. And I shall discover it.’ He was a remarkable man. But when we were alone we begged Hugh to send a cable to Ankara. He was absolutely immovable.

  ‘I’m going to see it through myself,’ he said. ‘If it comes to a trial there’s going to be the most shocking scandal at any rate. Whether they find me guilty or innocent, somebody will always bring it up. The only thing is to convince them that I didn’t do it at this stage before they charge me. Besides, what will my Ambassador think if I arrive in Persia under a cloud.’

  Exhausted we returned to the town. On the way one of the jeeps full of policemen broke down. The Judge ordered us to abandon them. No one was sorry, they were a brutal lot. We left them honking despairingly in the darkness; the soldiers were delighted.

  But there were inexhaustible supplies of policemen; at the station in Bayazid half a dozen more poured out of the building, surrounding us.

  ‘My God, they’re going to lock me up for the night.’ All day Hugh had behaved with the most admirable calmness. Now for the first time he showed signs of strain.

  ‘Malheureusement,’ said the Interpreter, turning to Wanda and myself and showing a set of broken yellow teeth, ‘M. Carless doit rester ici mais VOUS, VOUS êtes libre.’

  ‘I don’t need a policeman,’ Hugh said. I had never seen him so angry. ‘You have my word. I shan’t run away.’

  ‘You are not arrested yet. It is to protect you from incidents. Perhaps people will be angry.’

  With a policeman outside the inn shooing away the passers-by, the three of us ate rice and kebab and some very odd vegetables and drank a whole bottle of raki. We were famished, having eaten nothing since the previous night.

  At the next table was a medical officer in battledress. He was an Armenian and had the facility with languages of his race. ‘My name is Niki,’ he said. After dinner we sat with him on the roof under a rusty-looking moon. ‘This is a town of no-women,’ he said, pointing at the soldiery milling in the street below. ‘Look, there are thousands of them. They are all becoming mad because there is nothing here for them – or for me,’ he added more practically.

  ‘This is your country?’

  ‘This was my country. There is no Armenia any more. All those shops’ – pointing at the shop fronts now shuttered and barred – ‘Armenian – dead, dead, all dead. Tomorrow they will decide whether you will be tried or not,’ he went on to Hugh. ‘If you need me I will come. I think it is better th
at you should not be tried. I have heard that there is a German from Tehran here, a lorry driver who has cut off a child’s foot with his lorry. He has been three months awaiting a trial. They keep him without trousers so that he shall not escape.’

  Next morning all three of us took pains with our appearance. The internal arrangements at the inn were so loathsome that I shared a kerosene tin of water with Hugh and shaved on the roof, the cynosure of the entire population who were out in force. Wanda, debarred from public appearance, was condemned to the inside. As a final touch our shoes were cleaned by a boot-black who refused to charge. I was impressed but not Hugh.

  ‘I don’t suppose they charge anything at the Old Bailey.’ Nothing could shake his invincible gloom.

  At nine o’clock, sweltering in our best clothes, we presented ourselves at the Courthouse and joined a queue of malefactors.

  After a short wait we were called. The room was simple, whitewashed, with half a dozen chairs and a desk for the Prosecutor. On it was a telephone at which we looked lovingly. Behind the Prosecutor lurked his evil genius, the Interpreter.

  The Prosecutor began to speak. It was obvious that one way or the other he had made his mind up. He was, he said, interested only in Justice and Justice would be done. It was unfortunate for M. Carless that he did not possess a Diplomatic Visa for Turkey otherwise it would be difficult to detain him. We now knew that Hugh was doomed. But, he went on, as his visa only applied to Iran, he proposed to ask for proceedings to be stayed for a week while he consulted the authorities in Ankara.

  ‘Malheureusement, c’est pas possible pour M. Carless,’ said the Interpreter winding up with relish, ‘mais vous êtes libre d’aller en Iran.’

  For two hours we argued; when Hugh flagged I intervened; then Wanda took up the struggle; arguments shot backwards and forwards across the room like tennis balls: about diplomatic immunity, children languishing in Europe without their mother, ships and planes missed, expeditions ruined, the absence of witnesses.

  ‘Several beatings were given yesterday for the discouragement of false witnesses and their evidence is inadmissible,’ said the Prosecutor, but he was remote, immovable.

  ‘Malheureusement vous devez rester ici sept jours pour qu’arrive une réponse à notre telegramme,’ said the Interpreter in his repulsive French.

  ‘Monsieur le Procureur a envoyé une telegramme?’

  ‘Pas encore,’ replied the Interpreter, leering triumphantly. I had never seen him look happier.

  We implored Hugh to send a telegram to Ankara. He was adamant but he did agree to send for Niki, the Armenian doctor. It was not easy to find an un-named Armenian M.O. in a garrison town but he arrived in an hour, by jeep, round and fat but to us a knight in armour. The Interpreter was banished and Niki began translating sentence by sentence, English to Turkish, Turkish to English. Hugh spoke of N.A.T.O. and there was a flicker of interest, of how the two countries had fought together on the same side in Korea, of the great qualities of the Turkish Nation, of the political capital that the Russians would make when the news became known, that such a situation would not happen in England. Finally, Hugh said he wanted to send a telegram. We knew what agony this decision cost him.

  ‘It is extremely difficult. There is no direct communication. We shall first have to send to Erzerum.’

  ‘Then send it to Erzerum.’

  ‘It will take three days. You still wish?’

  ‘Yes, I wish.’

  Hugh wrote the telegram. It looked terrible on paper. I began to understand why he had been so reluctant to send it.

  ‘Detained Bayazid en route Tehran awaiting formulation of charge killing civilian stop Diplomatic visa applicable Iran only.’

  Niki translated it into Turkish; holding the message, the Prosecutor left the room. After a few minutes he returned with a heavily moustached clerk in shirt-sleeves. For more than ten minutes he dictated with great fluency. It was a long document. When it was finished Niki read it aloud. It gave an account of the entire affair and expressed Hugh’s complete innocence.

  The last stamp was affixed; the Prosecutor clapped his hands, coffee was brought in.

  It all happened so quickly that it was difficult to believe that it was all over.

  ‘But what made him change his mind?’ It was an incredible volte-face.

  ‘The Public Prosecutor asks me to say,’ said Niki, ‘that it is because M. Carless was gentlemanly in this thing, because you were all gentlemanly,’ bowing to Wanda, ‘that he has decided not to proceed with it.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Airing in a Closed Carriage

  In Tehran Wanda left us to return to Europe.

  On 30 June, eleven days from Istanbul, Hugh and I reached Meshed, the capital of the province of Khurasan, in north-east Persia, and drove through streets just dark to the British Consulate-General, abandoned since Mussadiq’s coup and the breaking off of diplomatic relations in 1953.

  After a long wait at the garden gate we were admitted by an old, grey-bearded sepoy of the Hazarah Pioneers. He had a Mongolian face and was dressed in clean khaki drill with buttons polished. Here we were entertained kindly by the Hindu caretaker.

  The place was a dream world behind high walls, like a property in the Deep South of the United States. Everywhere lush vegetation reached out long green arms to destroy what half a century of care had built up. The great bungalows with walls feet thick were collapsing room by room, the wire gauze fly nettings over the windows were torn and the five-year-old bath water stagnant in the bathrooms. In the living rooms were great Russian stoves, standing ceiling high, black and banded like cannon set in the walls, warming two rooms at once, needing whole forests of wood to keep them going.

  The Consulate building itself was lost and forgotten; arcades of Corinthian columns supported an upper balcony, itself collapsing. The house was shaded by great trees, planted perhaps a century ago, now at their most magnificent. Behind barred windows were the big green safes with combination locks in the confidential registry. I asked Hugh how they got them there.

  ‘In the days of the Raj you could do anything.’

  ‘But they must weigh tons. There’s no railway.’

  ‘If Curzon had anything to do with it, they were probably dragged overland from India.’

  On the wall in one of the offices we found a map of Central Asia. It was heavily marked in coloured pencil. One such annotation well inside Russian Territory, beyond a straggling river, on some sand dunes in the Kara-Kum desert read, ‘Captain X, July, ‘84’ and was followed by a cryptic question mark.

  ‘The Great Game,’ said Hugh. It was a sad moment for him, born nearly a century too late to participate in the struggle that had taken place between the two great powers in the no-man’s-land between the frontiers of Asiatic Russia and British India.

  Apart from Hugh and myself, everyone inside the Consulate firmly believed that the British would return. In the morning when we met the old man from Khurasan who had been in the Guides Cavalry, the younger one who had been in a regiment of Punjabis and the old, old man who was the caretaker’s cook, I felt sad under their interrogation about my health and regiment. To them it was as though the Indian Army as they had known it still existed.

  ‘Apka misaj kaisa hai, Sahib?’

  ‘Bilkul tik hai.’

  ‘Apka paltan kya hai?’

  I had acquired Urdu rapidly sixteen years before. It had vanished as quickly as it came. Soon I dried up completely and was left mouthing affirmatives. ‘Han, han.’

  ‘For God’s sake don’t keep on saying, “Han, han”. They’ll think you’re crazy.’

  ‘I’ve said everything I can remember. What do you want me to say. That we’re not coming back, ever?’1

  With all the various delights of Meshed to sample it was late when we set off. Driving in clouds of dust and darkness beyond the outer suburbs the self-starter began to smoke. Grovelling under the vehicle among the ants and young scorpions, fearful of losing our feet when
the great American lorries roared past, we attained the feeling of comradeship that only comes in moments of adversity.

  The starter motor was held in place by two inaccessible screws that must have been tightened by a giant. It was a masterpiece of British engineering. With the ants marching and counter-marching over me, I held a guttering candle while Hugh groped with the tinny spanner that was part of the manufacturers’ ‘tool-kit’.

  ‘What does the book say?’

  It was difficult to read it with my nose jammed into the earth.

  ‘The starter is pre-packed with grease and requires no maintenance during the life of the vehicle.’

  ‘That’s the part about lubrication but how do you GET IT OFF?’

  It was like trying to read a first folio in a crowded train. I knocked over the candle and for a time we were in complete darkness.

  ‘It says: “Loosen the retaining screws and slide it.”’

  ‘There must be a place in hell for the man who wrote that.’

  ‘Perhaps you have to take the engine out first.’

  Late at night we returned unsuccessful to the city and in the Shāri Tehran, the Warren Street of Meshed, devoted to the motor business, hammered on the wooden doors of what until recently had been a caravanserai, until the night watchman came with stave and lantern and admitted us.

  In the great court, surrounded by broken-down droshkies and the skeletons of German motor-buses, we spread our sleeping-bags on the oily ground beside our vehicle. For the first time since leaving Istanbul we had achieved Hugh’s ambition to sleep ‘under the stars’.

  Early the next morning the work was put in hand at a workshop which backed on to the courtyard. It was the sort of place where engines are dismembered and never put together again. The walls of the shop were covered with the trophies of failure, which, together with the vast, inanimate skeletons outside, gave me the same curious feelings of fascination and horror that I still experience in that part of the Natural History Museum devoted to prehistoric monsters.