A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  The proprietor Abdul, a broken-toothed demon of a man, conceived a violent passion for Hugh. We sat with him drinking coffee inside one of the skeletons while his assistant, a midget ten-year-old, set to work on the starter with a spanner as big as himself, shaming us by the ease with which he removed it.

  ‘Arrrh, CAHARLESS, soul of your father. You have ill-used your motor-car.’ He hit Hugh a violent blow of affection in the small of the back, just as he was drinking his coffee.

  ‘Urggh!’

  ‘What do you say, O CAHARLESS?’

  Hugh was mopping thick black coffee from his last pair of clean trousers.

  ‘I say nothing.’

  ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘How should I know.’

  ‘You are angry with me. Let us go to my workshop and I shall make you happy.’

  He led us into the shop. There he left us. In a few minutes he returned with a small blind boy, good-looking but with an air of corruption. Abdul threw down his spanner with a clang and began to fondle him.

  ‘CAHARLESS!’ he roared, beckoning Hugh.

  ‘NO!’

  Presently Abdul pressed the boy into a cupboard and shut the door. There followed a succession of nasty stifled noises that drove us out of the shop.

  Later, when we returned, Hugh was given a tremendous welcome.

  ‘CAHARLESS, I thought you were departed for ever. You have come back!’

  ‘You still have my motor-car.’

  To me he was less demonstrative but also less polite, snatching my pipe from my mouth and clenching it between his awful broken teeth in parody of an Englishman.

  ‘CAHARLESS, when you take me to Englestan I shall smoke the pipe.’

  All through the hot afternoon he worked like a demon with his midget assistant, every few minutes beseeching Hugh to take him to England. After two hours the repairs were finished. Now he wanted to show us how he had driven to Tehran in fourteen hours, a journey that had taken us two days and most of one night.

  In breathless heat he whirled us through the streets, tyres screeching at the corners. We were anxious to pay the bill and be off. Never had we met anyone more horrible than Abdul, more energetic and more likely to succeed.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘CAHARLESS, my heart, CAHARLESS, my soul, you will transport me to Englestan?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘We shall drive together?’

  What a pair they would make on the Kingston By-Pass.

  ‘Yes, of course, Bastard’ (in English). ‘How much?’

  The machine almost knocked down a heavily swathed old lady descending from a droshky and screamed to a halt outside a café filled with evil-looking men, all of whom seemed to be smitten with double smallpox.

  ‘CAHARLESS, I am your slave. I will drive you to Tehran.’

  ‘Praise be to God for your kindness (and I hope you drop dead). THE BILL.’

  ‘CAHARLESS, soul of your father, I shall bring you water. Ho, there, Mohammed Gholi. Oh, bring water for CAHARLESS, my soul, my love. He is thirsty.’

  He screamed at the robbers in the shop, who came stumbling out with a great chatti which they slopped over Carless.

  ‘Thank you, that is sufficient.’

  ‘CAHARLESS, I love you as my son.’

  ‘This bill is enormous.’

  It was enormous but probably correct.

  A little beyond Meshed we stopped at a police post in a miserable hamlet to ask the way to the Afghan Frontier and Herat. I was already afflicted with the gastric disorders that were to hang like a cloud over our venture, a pale ghost of the man who had climbed the Spiral Stairs on Dinas Cromlech less than a month before. Hugh seemed impervious to bacilli and, as I sat in the vehicle waiting for him to emerge from the police station, I munched sulphaguanadine tablets gloomily and thought of the infected ice-cream he had insisted on buying at Kazvin on the road from Tabriz to Tehran.

  ‘We must accustom our stomachs to this sort of thing,’ he had said and had shared it with Wanda, who had no need to accustom herself to anything as she was returning to Italy.

  The germs had been so virulent that she had been struck down almost at once; only after three days in bed at the Embassy with a high temperature had she been able to totter to the plane on the unwilling arm of a Queen’s Messenger. I had rejected the ice-cream. Hugh had eaten it and survived. It was unjust; I hated him; now I wondered whether my wife was dead, and who would look after my children.

  I had succumbed much later. In the fertile plain between Neishapur and Meshed we had stopped at a qanat for water. The qanat, a subterranean canal, was in a grove of trees and this was the place where it finally came to the surface after its journey underground. It was a magical spot, cool and green in the middle of sunburnt fields. There was a mound grown with grass like a tumulus with a mill room hollowed out of it and a leat into which the water gushed from a brick conduit, the qanat itself flowing under the mill. In several different spouts the water issued from the far side of the mound. It was as complex as a telephone exchange.

  ‘Bound to be good,’ Hugh said, confronted by the crystal jets. ‘Qanat water. Comes from the hills.’

  It was delicious. After we had drunk a couple of pints each we discovered that the water didn’t come from the qanat but from the conduit which came overland from a dirty-looking village less than a mile away.

  ‘I can’t understand why you’re so fussy,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t affect me.’

  Now, as I sat outside the police station brooding over these misfortunes, there was a sudden outburst of screams and moans from the other side of the road, becoming more and more insistent and finally mounting to such a crescendo that I went to investigate.

  Gathered round a well or shaft full of the most loathsome sewage was a crowd of gendarmes in their ugly sky-blue uniforms and several women in a state of happy hysteria, one screaming more loudly than the rest.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Bābā,’ said one of the policemen, pointing to the seething mess at our feet and measuring the length of quite a small baby. He began to keen; presumably he was the father. I waited a little, no one did anything.

  This was the moment I had managed to avoid all my life; the rescue of the comrade under fire, the death-leaper from Hammersmith Bridge saved by Newby, the tussle with the lunatic with the cut-throat razor.

  Feeling absurd and sick with anticipation I plunged head first into the muck. It was only four feet deep and quite warm but unbelievable, a real eastern sewer. The first time I got hold of something cold and clammy that was part of an American packing case. The second time I found nothing and came up spluttering and sick to find the mother beating a serene little boy of five who had watched the whole performance from the house next door into which he had strayed. The crowd was already dispersing; the policeman gave me tea and let me change in the station house but the taste and smell remained.

  Five miles beyond the police post the road forked left for the Afghan Frontier. It crossed a dry river bed with banks of gravel and went up past a large fortified building set on a low hill. After my pointless immersion I had become cold and my teeth were chattering. It seemed a good enough reason to stop the vehicle and have a look. Only some excuse such as this could halt our mad career, for whoever was driving seemed possessed of a demon who made it impossible ever to stop. Locked in the cab we were prisoners. We could see the country we passed through but not feel it and the only smells, unless we put our heads out of the window (a hazardous business if we both did it at the same time), were the fumes of the exhaust and our foul pipes; vistas we would gladly have lingered over had we been alone were gone in an instant and for ever. If there is any way of seeing less of a country than from a motor-car I have yet to experience it.

  The building was a caravanserai, ruined and deserted, built of thin flat bricks. The walls were more than twenty feet high, decorated on the side where the gate was with blind, pointed arches. Each corner was defended by a
smooth round tower with a crumbling lip.

  Standing alone in a wilderness of scrub, it was an eerie place. The wind was strong and under the high gateway, flanked by embrasures, it whistled in the machicolations. Inside it was a warren of dark, echoing tunnels and galleries round a central court, open to the sky, with the same pointed arches as on the outer wall but here leading into small cells for the accommodation of more important travellers. In time of need this was a place that might shelter a thousand men and their animals.

  The roof was grown thick with grass and wild peas, masking open chimney holes as dangerous as oubliettes. The view from the ramparts was desolate.

  The air was full of dust and, as the sun set, everything was bathed in a blinding saffron light. There was not a house or a village anywhere, only a whitewashed tomb set on a hill and far up the river bed, picking their way across the grey shingle, a file of men and donkeys. Here for me, rightly or wrongly, was the beginning of Central Asia.

  We drove on and on and all the time I felt worse. Finally we reached a town called Fariman. A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted. Through waves of nausea I saw that Hugh had stopped outside some sort of café.

  ‘I think we’d better eat here.’ To my diseased imagination he seemed full of bounce.

  ‘I don’t think I can manage any more.’

  ‘You are a funny fellow; always talking about food, now you don’t want any.’

  ‘You forget I’ve already eaten.’

  He disappeared for a moment, then I saw him in the doorway semaphoring at me. With my last remaining strength I tottered into the building. It was a long room, brilliantly lit, empty except for the proprietor. He was bald, but for a grubby-looking frizz of grey curls, and dressed in a long, prophetic sort of garment. Hanging like a miasma over him and everything else in the building was a terrible smell of grease.

  ‘Ovis aries, fat-tailed sheep, they store it up in their tails for the winter.’

  ‘I’ve never smelt a sheep like this, dead or alive.’

  ‘It’s excellent for cooking,’ Hugh said. Nevertheless, he ordered boiled eggs.

  I had ‘mast’. Normally an innocuous dish of curdled milk fit for the most squeamish stomach, it arrived stiff as old putty, the same colour and pungent.

  While I was being noisily ill in the street, a solitary man came to gaze. ‘Shekam dard,’ I said, pointing to my stomach, thinking to enlist his sympathy, and returned to the work in hand. When next I looked at him he had taken off his trousers and was mouthing at me. With my new display of interest, he started to strip himself completely until a relative led him away struggling.

  That night we huddled in our sleeping-bags at the bottom of a dried-out watercourse. It seemed to offer some protection from the wind, which howled about us, but in the morning we woke to find ourselves buried under twin mounds of sand like dead prospectors. But for the time being I was cured: sixteen sulphaguanadine tablets in sixteen hours had done it.

  Full of sand we drove to the frontier town, Taiabad. It was only eight o’clock but the main street was already an oven. The military commander, a charming colonel, offered us sherbet in his office. It was delicious and tasted of honey. Hugh discussed the scandals of the opium smuggling with him. ‘It is a disgraceful habit,’ the Colonel said. ‘Here, of course, it is most rigorously repressed but it is difficult to control the traffic at more remote places.’ (In the Customs House the clerks were already at this hour enveloped in clouds of smoke.) ‘You are going to Kabul. Which route are you proposing to take?’

  We asked him which he thought the best.

  ‘The northern is very long; the centre, through the Hazara country, is very difficult; the way by Kandahar is very hot. We are still awaiting the young American, Winant. He set off to come here by the northern route in May.’

  ‘But today’s the second of July.’

  ‘There was a Swedish nurse with him. Also he was very religious. It was a great mistake – a dangerous combination. Now we shall never see them again. In some respects it is a disagreeable country. Unless you are bound to go there, I counsel you to remain in Iran. I shall be delighted to put you up here for as long as you wish. It is very lonely for me here.’

  We told him our plans.

  ‘You are not armed? You are quite right. It is inadvisable; so many travellers are, especially Europeans. It only excites the cupidity of the inhabitants. I should go by Kandahar. Your visas are for Kandahar and that is the only route they will permit anyway. That is if anyone at the customs post can read,’ he added mischievously.

  Reluctantly we took leave of this agreeable man and set off down the road through a flat wilderness, until we came to a road block formed by a solitary tree-trunk. In the midst of this nothingness, pitched some distance from the road, was a sad little tent shuddering in the wind. After we had sounded the horn for some minutes a sergeant appeared and with infinite slowness drew back the tree-trunk to let us pass and without speaking returned to the flapping tent. Whatever indiscretion the Colonel may have been guilty of to land himself in such a place as Taiabad paled into utter insignificance when one considered the nameless crimes that this sergeant must have been expiating in his solitary tent.

  After eight miles in a no-man’s-land of ruined mud forts and nothing else we came to a collection of buildings so deserted-looking that we thought they must be some advanced post evacuated for lack of amenity. This time the tree-trunk was white-washed. As Hugh got down to remove it, angry cries came from the largest and most dilapidated building and a file of soldiers in hairy uniforms that seemed to have been made from old blankets poured out of it and hemmed us in. As we marched across the open space towards the building, the wind was hot like an electric hair dryer and strong enough to lean on.

  Inside the customs house in a dim corridor several Pathans squatted together sharing a leaky hubble-bubble. They had semitic, feminine faces but were an uncouth lot, full of swagger, dressed in saffron shirts and chaplis with rubber soles made from the treads of American motor tyres. In charge of them was a superior official in a round hat and blue striped pyjamas whom they completely ignored. It was he who stamped our passports without formality.

  The customs house was rocking in the wind which roared about it so loud that conversation was difficult.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ I screamed in Hugh’s ear.

  ‘It’s the Bād-i-Sad-o-Bist, “the Wind of Hundred and Twenty Days”.’

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the Pathans, ‘for a hundred and twenty days it blows. It started ten days ago. It comes from the north-west, but God only knows where it goes to.’

  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.

  Now the country was wilder still, the road more twisting, with a range of desolate mountains to the west dimly seen in the flying sand of the Bād-i-Sad-o-Bist. The only people we met were occasional roadmenders, desiccated heroes in rags, imploring us for water. To the left was the Hari-Rud, a great river burrowing through the sand, and we pointed to it as we swept past, smothering them in dust, but they put out their tongues and waved their empty water skins and cried, ‘namak, namak’ until we knew that the river was salt and we were shamed into stopping. It was a place of mirage. At times the river was so insubstantial that it tapered into nothingness, sometimes it became a lake, shivering like a jelly between earth and sky.

  At Tirpul the road crosses the river by a battered handsome bridge, six arches wide, built of brick. We swam in a deep pool under an arch on the right bank that was full of branches as sharp as bayonets, brought down by the floods. Nevertheless, it was a romantic spot. The air was full of dust and the wind roared about the bridge, whipping the water into waves topped with yellow froth that fallin
g became rainbows. Upstream a herd of bullocks were swimming the river, thirty of them, with the herdsmen astride the leaders and flankers, urging them on. Beyond the river was Tirpul itself, a small hamlet with strange wind machines revolving on mud towers, with an encampment of black nomad tents on the outskirts and a great square caravanserai deserted on a nearby hill.

  Out of the water, we dried out instantly and were covered with a layer of glistening salt. Hugh was a wild sight crouching on the bank in Pathan trousers, shalvār, far removed from the Foreign Office figure conjured up by the man at the Asian Desk. Here Hugh was in his element, on the shores of the Hari-Rud, midway between its source in the Kōh-i-Bāba mountains and the sands of the Kara-Kum, its unhealthy terminus in Russian Turkestan which holds the secret and perhaps the bones of the enigmatic Captain X whose name endures on the map in the Consulate at Meshed.

  Sixty miles farther on we arrived at Herat. On the outskirts of the city, raised by Alexander and sieged and sacked by almost everyone of any consequence in Central Asia, the great towers erected in the fifteenth century by Gauhar Shah Begum, the remarkable wife of the son of Timur Leng,2 King Shah Rukh, soar into the sky. Only a few of the ceramic tiles the colour of lapislazuli, that once covered these structures from top to bottom, still remain in position.

  In the city itself the police stood on platforms of timber thick enough to withstand the impact of a bus or a runaway elephant, directing a thin trickle of automobiles with whistles and ill-tempered gestures, like referees.

  In the eastern suburbs, where the long pine avenues leading to the Parq Otel were as calm and deadly as those round Bournemouth, the system became completely ludicrous. At every intersection a policeman in sola topi drooped in a coma of boredom until, galvanized into activity by our approach, he sternly blew his whistle and held up the non-existent traffic to let us pass.