A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  The Parq Otel was terribly sad. In the spacious modernistic entrance hall, built in the thirties and designed to house a worldly, chattering throng, there was no one. Against the walls sofas of chromium tubing, upholstered in sultry red uncut moquette, alternated with rigid-looking chairs, enough for an influx of guests, who after thirty years had still not arrived. On the untenanted reception desk a telephone that never rang stood next to a letter rack with no letters in it. A large glass showcase contained half a dozen sticky little pools that had once been sweets, some dead flies and a coat hanger.

  Besides ourselves the only other occupants of the Parq were two Russian engineers. We met them dragging themselves along the corridors from distant bathrooms in down-at-heel carpet slippers. They had gone to pieces. Who could blame them?

  While Hugh washed in one of the fly-blown bathrooms, I went to photograph the great towers. Maddened by gaping crowds, fearful of committing sacrilege, I drove the vehicle off the road on to what I took to be a rubbish dump. It turned out to be a Moslem cemetery from which there was an excellent view but the camera refused to wind the film, and as I struggled with it, the sun went down. From all sides the faithful, outraged by my awful behaviour, began to close in. Gloomily I got back into the car and drove away.

  By the time we left Herat it was dark. All night we drove over shattering roads, taking turns at the wheel, pursued by a fearful tail wind that swirled the dust ahead of us like a London fog. If it had been possible we should have lost the way, but there was only one road.

  Until midnight we had driven in spells of an hour; now we changed every thirty minutes. It was difficult to average twenty miles in an hour and trying to do so we broke two shock absorbers. It was also difficult to talk with our mouths full of dust but we mumbled at one another in desultory fashion to keep awake.

  ‘The aneroid shows seven thousand.’

  ‘I don’t care how high we are, I’m still being bitten.’

  ‘It’s something we picked up at that tea place.’

  ‘Perhaps if we go high enough they’ll die.’

  ‘If they’re as lively as this at this altitude, they’re probably fitted with oxygen apparatus.’

  Finally even these ramblings ceased and we were left each with the thoughts of disaster and bankruptcy that attend travellers in the hour before the dawn.

  The sun rose at five and the wind dropped. We were in a wide plain and before us was a big river, the Farah-Rud. As the owner of a tea-house had prophesied, the bridge was down. It was a massive affair but two arches had entirely vanished. It was difficult to imagine the cataclysm that had destroyed it.

  We crossed the river with the engine wrapped in oilskin, the fan belt removed, and with a piece of rubber hose on the exhaust pipe, to lift it clear of the water, led by a wild man wearing a turban and little else, one of the crew of three stationed on the opposite bank. In the middle the water rose over the floorboards and gurgled in our shoes.

  It was a beautiful morning; the sky, the sand and the river were all one colour, the colour of pearls. Over everything hung a vast silence, shattered when the ruffians on the other side started up a tractor.

  Because we were tired, having driven all night, we had forgotten to discuss terms for this pilotage. Now, safe on the other bank, too late we began to haggle.

  ‘This is a monstrous charge for wading a river.’ It was necessary to scream to make oneself heard above the sound of the tractor.

  ‘It is fortunate that we did not make use of the tractor,’ said the man in the ragged turban. ‘It is rare for a motor to cross by its own power. With the tractor you would have had greater cause for lamentation.’

  ‘That being so by now you must be men of wealth.’

  Back came the unanswerable answer.

  ‘But if we were not poor, Āghā, why should we be sitting on the shores of the Farah-Rud waiting for travellers such as you?’

  The walls of the hotel at Farah were whitewashed and already at six o’clock dazzling in the sun. Breakfast was set in the garden: it was a silly idea of our own: runny eggs and flies and dust and hot sun all mixed inextricably together in an inedible mass.

  We passed the day lying on charpoys in a darkened room. Hugh was out completely, like a submarine charging its batteries, naked but for his Pathan trousers. Except for a brief interval for lunch, mildly curried chicken and good bread, he slept ten hours.

  I could not sleep. I tried to read but it was too hot. Outside beyond the shutters the world was dead, sterilized by sun. At a little distance, shimmering in the heat, were the turreted walls of old Farah. I longed to visit it but the prospect of crossing the sizzling intervening no-man’s-land alone was too much. This was the city that Genghis Khan had captured and vainly attempted to knock down in the thirteenth century, that was re-occupied in the eighteenth and finally abandoned voluntarily in the nineteenth, so miserable had life within its walls become.

  The sun expired in a haze of dust and the long, terrible day was over. In the early evening we set off. To the left were the jagged peaks of the Siah Band range; there were no trees and no sign of water, but by the roadside wild melons were growing, and we halted to try them but they were without taste. As we grew sticky eating bought melons from Farah, using the bonnet of the vehicle as a table, two nomad men passed with a camel, followed at a distance of a quarter of a mile by a youngish woman who lurched along in an extremity of fatigue. Neither of the men paid the slightest attention to her but they saluted us cheerfully as they went past.

  It seemed impossible for the road to get worse, but it did: vast pot-holes large enough to contain nests of machine-gunners; places where it was washed away as far as the centre, leaving a six-foot drop to ground level; things Hugh called ‘Irish Bridges’, where a torrent had swept right through the road leaving a steep natural step at the bottom; all provided a succession of spine-shattering jolts. Whereas the previous night we had only met two lorries in the hours of darkness, there were now many monster American vehicles loaded with merchandise to the height of a two-storied house, each with its complement of piratical-looking men hanging on the scramble nettings, who jumped off to wedge the wheels on the steep gradients, while the passengers huddled together, making the crossing on foot groaning with apprehension.

  Sticky with melon we arrived at a town called Girishk on the Helmand river. There, under a mulberry tree, squatted the proprietor of a chaie khana, a long-headed, grey-bearded Pathan, chanting a dirge on the passing of a newly founded civilization, no new thing in this part of the world.

  ‘There is no light in the bazaar. The Americans brought light when they came to build the great dam’ (the Helmand River Barrage) ‘but when they left they took the machine with them and now there is no more light.

  ‘There is no more light and I am alone in the desert’ (this was an exaggeration – Girishk has eight thousand inhabitants) ‘with nothing but these tins and a teapot. Once I worked in a German woollen mill but now I am poor; we are all poor.’

  This was not the first time we had listened to those sad night intimacies of the tea-house. Nevertheless the old man’s lament was strangely impressive. Perhaps because of the time – the unearthly hour before the dawn; because of the outlandish noises – the cries of shepherds calling to one another in the open country beyond the town and the barking of their dogs, like them, bolstering their courage in the darkness; but most of all because of the place itself – the tea-house that was nothing but a rug under a tree with a fire of yellow scrub to warm it, round which lay sleeping figures wrapped like sarcophagi, with their feet pointing towards the flames. All these, together with the heaps of empty tins that were the proprietor’s inheritance and the giant fleas that invested us immediately we sat down, are not easily forgotten.

  We asked him about the dam, that vast scheme of which so much vague ill had been spoken all along the way.

  ‘It is all salt,’ he moaned, ‘the land below the American Dam. They did not trouble to find out and now th
e people will eat namak (salt) for ever and ever.’

  The oil lanterns that were tied to the mulberry trees and which illuminated the street began to flicker and go out one by one. We rose to leave.

  ‘You will be in Kandahar in two hours,’ he went on. ‘The Americans built the road; they have not taken that away.’

  It was as he said. The road was like a billiard table. The following morning we arrived at Kabul and drove down the great ceremonial avenues, newly asphalted, past Russian steamrollers still ironing out the final bumps, to the principal hotel. We were five days late. It was Friday, 5 July. In a month we had driven nearly 5,000 miles. Our journey was about to begin.

  * * *

  1. In 1957 the British Government allotted a sum of money for the repair of the Consulate-General. It is now used by the British Council.

  2. Tamerlane.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Little Bit of Protocol

  It was good to be separated from our motor-car, for which we had conceived a loathing normally reserved for the living, but no sooner were our feet planted on solid earth than difficulties of a ludicrous but nonetheless irksome kind began to pile up around us. The two most memorable were the affair of the Afghan bicyclist and the problem of Hugh’s old cook.

  Rather incautiously, but with the best of intentions, Hugh had suggested in one of his letters from South America that we should take with us one of the local inhabitants in order to impart what he called ‘an Afghan flavour’ to our climb, his idea being that it would, if nothing else, convince the authorities of our good intentions. But then he appeared to have forgotten about it – and so had I. Unfortunately he had incorporated his suggestion in the letter he wrote to the Foreign Office when he applied for permission to be allowed to make the journey, but without specifying any particular sort of companion.

  On the afternoon of our arrival, suitably clothed, washed and shaved, we presented ourselves to the Afghan Foreign Ministry. There, in the Protocol Department, we met the young hopes of the Afghan Foreign Service, elegant, intelligent young men who treated us with a courtesy, consideration and lack of curiosity superior to that shown by our own side when we had proposed our expedition. The difficulties that had appeared insuperable in London seemed to diminish when dealing with these splendid fellows. Hugh was so overcome with enthusiasm that he, unwisely I thought, raised the subject of an Afghan climber.

  ‘We should, of course, be delighted if someone nominated by you would like to accompany us.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ said Abdul Ali, ‘if you take my advice you will forget about it. You are only likely to land yourself with some fellow who will bore you stupid in a couple of days. Besides, no one here knows the first thing about climbing.’

  ‘I only mention it because I wrote officially.’

  ‘I should think no more about it if I were you.’

  ‘What about coming yourself?’ He seemed an excellent companion. We really meant it.

  ‘Unfortunately, we are extremely busy with the arrangements for the visit of the Pakistan Minister, otherwise I should be delighted.’

  He invited us to a splendid tea. Afghanistan is a man’s country, so that it was our host who hovered behind a battery of silver teapots, hot water, cream and milk jugs, handing out dainty sandwiches. Afterwards he spoke of his hunting experiences in some detail, and I fell into a coma from which I emerged refreshed and confident. But the next day brought bad omens.

  As a result of our long drive we were extremely unfit. Our three days in Wales had worked wonders with us, like one of those courses in physical culture on which you make a muscle-bound colossus of yourself in next to no time simply by pressing one hand hard against the other. But our fitness, like my knowledge of Urdu during the war, had been acquired swiftly in exceptional circumstances; now, equally rapidly, it had melted away.

  ‘We must do some climbing,’ said Hugh, as we reeled off to bed that evening after returning from a gramophone recital at one of the Embassies. ‘Ropework, that’s what we need. Mir Samir’s a terrific mountain.’

  I was as apprehensive as he was about our appalling condition. It may have been something to do with the altitude but we were finding it almost impossible to keep awake. At the recital, like the rest of the audience, we had both slept solidly through the entire performance. I had woken up with my head nestling on the bosom of a jolly female Turk to find her husband glowering at me; there are other dangers in Afghanistan besides tribal warfare.

  Then I remembered Hugh’s last letter from South America. ‘Acclimatization should be no great problem,’ he had written. ‘The Turcoman’s Throne (15,447) just above Kabul can be climbed in a day and we should probably spend a couple of days up there before setting out in earnest.’ But now that the need for acclimatization had become acute, Hugh changed his mind.

  ‘We’ll climb Legation Hill,’ he said. ‘I’ll set the alarm for five. We’d better wear our windproof suits.’ And fell asleep.

  The British Embassy lies beyond the town. Built at the express order of Lord Curzon to be the finest Embassy in Asia, it is strategically situated so far from the bazaars that none but the most heavily subsidized mob would dream of attacking it. Above the compound there is a small hill, perhaps a thousand feet high, up which young secretaries pelt in gym shoes after a heavy night. This is Legation Hill. In the early morning we set out to scale it, laden with heavy boots and all the impedimenta of our assumed trade.

  As we marched out of the front gate of the Embassy, roped together and in our windproof suits, the guards saluted.

  ‘They remember me,’ said Hugh, returning it with satisfaction. ‘Wonderfully faithful fellows, these Pakistanis.’

  ‘If you made a practice of this sort of thing while you were here, they’d have to be absolutely ga-ga not to.’

  As we tottered up the winding track, dripping with perspiration, tripping over the rope, our ice-axes clinking mockingly on the unfriendly soil, I was filled with gloomy forebodings. My legs felt like putty. I had a splitting headache and my tongue was covered with a thick unwholesome rime. It took us twenty-five minutes to reach the top.

  ‘Archie used to do it in ten,’ said Hugh, as panting and feeling sick, we sprawled on the summit, pretending to admire the extensive view of the suburbs of Kabul spread out below us.

  ‘He must be a superman.’

  ‘Not at all. He had to leave the Foreign Service because he drank too much.’

  In low spirits we descended for breakfast.

  ‘We’re certainly going to need those days on the Turcoman’s Throne.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s not going to be time. We shall have to limber up on the glaciers of Mir Samir. There’s plenty of scope there.’

  Back at the Protocol Department Abdul Ali looked serious.

  ‘Your permissions have come through.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. It’s very quick.’

  ‘I’m glad that you’re pleased. But there’s something else. A man has been chosen to accompany you.’

  ‘But you said you thought we would be better advised to go alone.’

  ‘I know. It’s most curious. It’s nothing to do with us here. None of us know anything about it. It came from someone outside our Department, and on the highest level. Until yesterday it was in the hands of the Ministry of Defence.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hugh, with a return of satisfaction. ‘It must be the Nuristani I hoped for from the Army. I did mention him in my letter to the Ambassador. Just the man we want.’

  ‘He isn’t a Nuristani,’ said Abdul Ali. ‘I only wish for your sake he was. The thing’s out of the hands of the Defence Ministry. They’ve passed it to the Olympic Committee. This man’s just come back from riding round the world on a bicycle. He’s never been on a mountain in his life.’

  Quite soon, summoned by telephone, the candidate appeared. He was a large, muscular man with a lot of black hair laced with brilliantine, like something out of a Tarzan film. His appearance belied his character,
which was retiring. It was true about riding round the world on a bicycle. He had performed this feat on a massive roadster of the sort issued to policemen, carrying with him 150 lb. of baggage. It was difficult to imagine him on the Simplon Pass but he had undoubtedly been there. Against my will I found myself conducting a sort of viva voce examination of this formidable being.

  ‘Have you had any previous climbing experience?’

  ‘None at all,’ he said and my heart warmed to him. ‘But I did run in the ten thousand metres in the Asian Games,’ he added modestly.

  ‘I see.’

  Like all similar interviews this one was not a success, owing to the complete lack of qualifications of the interviewer.

  ‘How did you come to apply for this? It’s going to be very arduous.’ I glared horribly, trying to discourage him.

  ‘I didn’t apply. The Olympic Committee only told me that I was going this morning.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t keep on saying that,’ Hugh hissed in my ear. ‘You make it sound like the B.B.C.’

  ‘Are you keen to come on this trip?’

  ‘If you wish me to come I shall come.’

  Hugh was just about to say yes when I kicked him violently under the table.

  ‘Everything is a little complicated at the moment. We’ll let you know in the morning.’

  ‘Of course, we shall have to take him,’ said Hugh as soon as he had gone.

  ‘But why? He doesn’t want to go. You heard what he said, he’s been ordered to. It’s going to be bad enough with two of us knowing nothing; with one more it’ll be suicide.’

  ‘You don’t seem to realize that because the Government has selected him, we must take him. If we don’t they’ll be very offended.’