A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  ‘But even the Protocol think we’d be better alone. You heard what Abdul Ali said.’

  ‘That was before he knew about this man. You don’t understand these people at all. A thing like this might have a very bad effect on Anglo-Afghan relations.’

  I looked at Hugh closely when he said this but he was quite serious. Here it was again breaking the surface, that massive but elusive entity, the Foreign Office Mind, like an iceberg with most of its bulk hidden below the surface but equally menacing. Hugh had no more wish to take the cyclist than the cyclist had to come with us, but he was not able to see that the machinery that had produced him could be put in reverse. For two hours I argued with him. It was in vain.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t think you have any sense of moral responsibility at all,’ he said after a particularly heated exchange. ‘This man has virtually been given to us by Protocol.’

  ‘Well, if he was given to us by Protocol, give him back by Protocol. Perhaps he hasn’t got any boots.’

  ‘That’s an idea,’ said Hugh, unexpectedly. ‘He couldn’t come if he didn’t have any boots.’

  Although it was late he went to telephone. Soon he was back.

  ‘He hasn’t got any boots.’

  ‘Then he can’t come.’

  ‘But I telephoned Abdul Ali and he’s promised to do his best to get some. He’ll let us know in the morning. He’s going to try the Army. I said we’d try the Embassy.’

  ‘You are an ass.’

  ‘It’s all right, he’s got very small feet. There’s no one with feet like that in the whole compound.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If you’d lived in the compound for a couple of years you get to know the size of everything.’

  The next morning Abdul Ali telephoned.

  ‘I’m afraid there is not a pair of boots to fit our friend in the whole of Kabul.’

  ‘Could you lend him a pair yourself? He’s about your size.’

  I could have strangled Hugh at this moment.

  ‘Unfortunately I only have two pairs and I shall be using them myself on a hunting trip quite soon.’

  ‘I am extremely sorry that he won’t be able to come. Please convey our regrets to him and my thanks to the Olympic Committee.’

  ‘For a man who has only been in the Foreign Service since the war I must say you’ve made remarkable progress,’ I said as Hugh replaced the receiver. ‘You’re almost inhuman.’

  He considered this for a moment before replying.

  ‘Yes, I think on the whole the training is excellent,’ he said with a smile.

  Even more far-reaching in its effects on the welfare of our expedition was the business of Ghulam Naabi, Hugh’s old cook, who had accompanied him on his previous ventures into the interior and had been present at the abortive attempt to scale the mountain.

  All the way from Istanbul, a lean period of abstinence from food, chez Carless, I had been upheld in spirit, if nothing else, by a continual flow of reminiscence about Ghulam Naabi; his prodigious appetite that would at least, I thought, ensure the regular supply of victuals that had up to now been denied me; his resourcefulness that enabled him in a rather oblique way to overcome the everyday disasters of the road; the ludicrous misadventures that befell him and which would probably provide us with an inexhaustible supply of anecdote. All gave promise of a sympathetic, fallible character who would lend a certain humanity to the rather austere project on which we were embarking, and be a far more rewarding companion than the young biologist with whom I had been threatened at one stage of our planning but to whom, mercifully, no further reference had been made.

  Even Dreesen, the companion of Hugh’s earlier journey whom I had from the outset regarded as a semi-mythical character but who had eventually materialized in the guise of United States Consul at Tabriz in north-western Persia, had spoken well of him, as we sat on the Consular terrace in the gloaming, drinking Perrier Jouet, and recovering from the horrors of our passage through Anatolia.

  ‘If Hugh takes Ghulam Naabi you’ll have some chance of survival,’ he said when Hugh was out of earshot. ‘If not, God help you.’

  I asked him why. These were the early days before Hugh had endeavoured to destroy us with infected food.

  ‘The man’s a fiend. He never eats. I got so hungry on that mountain I thought I’d die. He doesn’t seem to realize you can’t go charging about at seventeen thousand feet on an empty stomach.’

  My heart warmed to Dreesen, but he continued:

  ‘That’s one of the reasons we’re having champagne this evening. I’m celebrating too; because I’m not going.’

  He had been joking but nevertheless I had felt a certain chill of apprehension. If this lean, husky individual who had crossed the Karakorams on foot, had felt the strain, what was it going to be like for me, relatively enfeebled by years in the dress business?

  One of Hugh’s first acts on arriving in Kabul was to summon Ghulam Naabi.

  ‘He’s working for an Australian,’ he explained. ‘But I think he should come on the preliminary reconnaissance before we set off. Besides, he’ll be very useful when we choose our Tajik drivers.’

  ‘But this man he’s working for. What’s he going to say if you take his cook away from him?’

  ‘It’s only for a month,’ Hugh said, as if this was some extenuation for robbing a man of his cook. ‘Besides he’s an Australian.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? It doesn’t seem to make it any more legitimate to me.’

  ‘I mean, being an Australian he’s pretty certain to be an easy-going sort of fellow.’

  I thought of some of the Australians I had met and how little I should have liked to deprive them of anything without asking first.

  When Ghulam Naabi finally appeared, he seemed a perfect choice. He was round and brown and fat and jolly and resembled a Christmas pudding. His eyes were like shiny currants and he was even done up in something that was like a white pudding cloth but was really an old white mess jacket. He wore a Karakul cap and on his feet were chaplis from Peshawar with soles three inches thick, constructed from the treads of American motor tyres. He was delighted at the prospect of an outing; about the greater scheme he said nothing.

  In the afternoon Hugh suggested that I accompany Ghulam Naabi to the bazaar to buy provisions for the journey.

  ‘We’ve really got plenty for ourselves,’ he said in the particularly off-hand voice he always employed when speaking of food (I thought of the four boxes of army rations that so far constituted our only guard against death by starvation and my blood ran cold). ‘It’s really for the drivers; they expect it, it’s the custom.’

  ‘I’ve made a list,’ he went on, handing me a minute slip of paper. ‘I think you should go too, to see that he doesn’t overdo it. Besides it will be a good opportunity for you to chaffer for bargains.’

  The list was very short:

  3 seers of flour

  8 pau of sugar

  12 pau of salt

  6 doz. safety matches

  2 hurricane lanterns.

  There was no doubt that, whatever sufferings we were about to undergo, Hugh intended that the drivers should participate equally.

  ‘Aren’t we going to take any rice? I always thought it was a staple food in this part of the world.’

  ‘Too heavy. We must think of the horses; probably we’ll only have three.’

  I was reluctant to ask him to explain the weights and measures. He was already irritated that I had not made any appreciable advances in my knowledge of Persian and I wanted to reserve my interrogations for the journey. It seemed simple enough but, in order not to be entirely at the mercy of the stall holders, I looked up the weights and measures in an official handbook, where they were set out with devilish ingenuity.

  ‘At Kabul,’ said the book, ‘16 khurds = 1 charak; 4 charaks = 1 seer.’ This seemed straightforward enough. I turned the page expecting to find what the seer equalled and learned that it equalled 7 se
ers 13½ chittaks British Indian Weight.

  ‘But at Kandahar,’ it went on triumphantly, ‘20 miskals = 1 seer, which is 85/8 tolas British while at Mazar-i-Sharif, 1 Mazar seer = 1¾ Kabuli seers – that is 14 British Seers.’ There was no mention at all of the pau of which I was supposed to buy 8 of sugar and 12 of salt.

  It was obvious that with the limited time at my disposal I was not destined to learn much about the weights and measures of the country, so for the time being I abandoned the attempt and let Ghulam Naabi do the haggling. I only intervened once, when he was about to buy the hurricane lanterns.

  ‘Ask the man if he’s got any other lanterns. Better lanterns.’ The ones we were being offered had ‘Bulldog Lantern’ marked on them and, less prominently, ‘Made in Japan’. It seemed an appropriate occasion to buy British, or at least Empire.

  ‘They are very good lanterns. You do not like them? Here everyone uses them.’

  ‘Haven’t they got any others? Not Japanese.’

  The owner of the shop vanished into the dark recesses. After a long interval he reappeared with two more lanterns. They appeared to have been in stock for some considerable time. When he had blown the dust from them, I saw that they were precisely the same as the Japanese lanterns, except that this time the name was ‘Lifeguard’ embossed with a picture of a trooper of the Household Cavalry, and the label ‘Made in Germany’ was more prominent.

  The shopkeeper named a price two and a half times the Japanese. I gave up the struggle to support the Empire.

  ‘It is always better to buy Japanese,’ remarked Ghulam Naabi, when some twenty minutes later he had effected a fifty per cent reduction in the price of the Japanese lanterns. ‘Much cheaper. Everything Japanese comes by railway, through Russia.’

  We made one last stop to buy six dozen boxes of Russian safety matches, which effectively undercut in price even the Japanese matches, and our shopping was at an end.

  I asked Ghulam Naabi whether we should have enough food. He must have understood where my anxiety lay, for he winked and said, ‘Sahib, all will be well. Do not be worried. Am I not a fat man?’

  Readers who are not interested in the history and geography of Nuristan should leave off here and start again at Chapter 8.

  The country which was our final goal is still, in the second half of the twentieth century, one of the least known in the world. As late as 1910 Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich, in his book, The Gates of India, could write of Nuristan:

  Who will unravel the secrets of this inhabited outland, which appears at present to be more impracticable to the explorer than either of the poles?

  Nearly fifty years have passed since the Chief Survey Officer of the Indian Section made this challenging statement but, even allowing for a certain exaggeration, there is no doubt that the means of getting into it have not become any easier; neither the aeroplane nor the motor-car has made the slightest difference. To get there you still have to walk.

  But it is not only the absence of roads that makes Nuristan difficult. The Afghan Government has displayed understandable reluctance in allowing travellers to enter it; partly because the inhabitants are unpredictable in their reception of foreigners and partly because potential visitors are suspected of being agents who would stir up trouble.

  Nuristan, ‘The Country of Light’, is a mountainous territory in the north-east of Afghanistan, lying between latitudes 34 and 36 north and longitudes 70 and 71–50 east, although some authorities consider that its southern limits extend a few more minutes southwards.

  It is walled in on every side by the most formidable mountains. To the north by the main Hindu Kush range, which is the watershed between the Oxus and the deserts of Central Asia and the Indus and the rivers that flow into the Indian Ocean; to the northeast by the Bashgul range, eastwards of the river of that name; to the east and south-east its boundary is the Kunar river to its junction with the Kabul river; and to the south and south-west the mountains which rise on the left bank of the Kabul river.

  To the west, the side from which we were approaching it, the boundary is a spur of the Hindu Kush on the east bank of the Panjshir, whose crowning points are Mir Samir and another unnamed mountain to the north-east. The whole of this area including the parts in Chitral has been estimated to cover an area of 5,000 square miles and has been known since early times as Kafiristan, ‘The Country of the Unbelievers’; the larger part, that inside Afghanistan, having been called Nuristan since 1895.

  Nuristan is drained by three main rivers. They all have their origins on its northern frontier and they all flow towards the Kabul river, from the great ox-bow bend that the Hindu Kush makes south-west of its junction with the Pamirs and the Karakoram range. The one farthest east is the Bashgul river; in the centre is the Pech and on the west, next to the Panjshir, is the Alingar whose upper waters are called the Ramgul; the Bashgul and the Pech discharging into the Kunar, the Alingar into the Kabul river above Jalalabad. Eventually all are united where the Kunar joins the Kabul and they continue together to the Indus and the Indian Ocean.

  These three valleys, all of which have innumerable subsidiary streams pouring into them, are linked indirectly by passes between 12,000 and 16,000 feet high, only negotiable on foot and closed by deep snow between October and March. Many of the valleys are heavily wooded and so deep that in autumn and winter they are said to remain in perpetual shadow.

  Each valley is inhabited by different tribes and each speaks its own language. All these languages belong to the group known as Dardic, which is said to be an offshoot from the original Aryan spoken by the inhabitants of the Khiva oasis in Trans-Caspia. But there coherence ends.

  It was at one time assumed that, because there were two main tribal divisions within the country, the Siah-Posh or Black-Robed Kafirs and the Safed-Posh or White-Robed Kafirs, who took their names from the dress they adopted, so also there were only two languages. But it is now known that while the Siah-Posh1 who inhabit the north and east all speak various dialects of Bashguli, the language spoken on the Bashgul river, all appear to be able to understand one another. With the Safed-Posh the language problem is so wildly complicated that one’s mind reels. Expressed in the simplest terms the situation seems to be as follows: the Safed-Posh occupy the centre and south-east and consist of three tribes, the Wai, the Presun or Parun and the Ashkun. The Wai live to the south-east of the Bashgul in the mountains above the Kunar river; the Presun on the upper part of the Pech river, and the Ashkun somewhere completely inaccessible in the mountains of the Alingar in the south-west. Of these the Wai and the Presun speak different languages that are mutually unintelligible and unintelligible to all the Siah-Posh, except for one small section of the Wai who speak a mixture of Siah-Posh Bashguli and Parun. To whom they are intelligible is not clear. The Ashkuns are reputed to speak a variant of the language of the Wai but, as no one has ever visited them who was qualified to express an opinion, their language and everything else about them remain a mystery.2

  The origins of the Kafirs are uncertain. There is a popular legend that they are descended in the male line from stragglers from the army of Alexander the Great, who skirted Kafiristan on the road to India.

  Having passed the winter of 327 B.C. with his army at Alexandreia ad Caucasum (near the present town of Charikar which lies at the junction of the Panjshir and Ghorband rivers at the foot of the Hindu Kush), Alexander dispatched one of his generals, Hephaeston, through the Khyber with the main body of the army to capture Taxila in the Upper Punjab. He himself set off with a lighter force along the north bank of the Kabul river and entered the Kunar Valley, where he defeated a blond, warlike people, the Aspasians, who may well have been indigenous Kafirs. It was in these operations against the Aspasians that Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, who later became King of Egypt, distinguished himself.

  Somewhere east of the Kunar, possibly in the province of Swat, at a point that has been the despair of archaeologists in their efforts to determine it, he came to the city of Nysa.

>   Of Nysa, Arrian speaks as follows:

  The city was built by Dionysos or Bacchus when he conquered the Indians, but who this Bacchus was, or at what time or from whence he conquered the Indians, is hard to determine. Whether he was that Theban who from Thrace or he who from Tmolus a mountain of Lydia undertook that famous expedition into India … is uncertain.

  Beyond the city was a mountain called Meros where the ivy grew. Being reminded by the inhabitants of the reverence expected of him, Alexander made a sacrifice to Bacchus and his troops made garlands, calling on Dionysos. What a scene it must have been, like some painting of Poussin!3

  To this day Nuristan is overgrown with ivy and vines and until lately the inhabitants were notable drinkers. As late as 1857 a missionary, the Reverend Ernest Trumpp, wrote that three Kafirs sent by Major Lumsden as recruits for the Corps of Guides demanded a mashak of wine a day, a leather water bag holding equal to six English gallons. Yet he also says that with this ration they were never drunk. Trumpp’s Kafirs never spoke of Kafiristan, which they regarded as an insulting epithet: they called it Wamasthan.

  Whether or not the Nysaeans were pre-Alexandrian invaders from Greece, at the time Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush, the plains of Kabul and the passes over the Hindu Kush from Andarab were certainly held by Greeks, descendants of those transported to Asia by Darius Hystaspes after the fall of Miletus. Equally certainly Kafiristan and its inhabitants in those days covered a far wider area than is occupied by Nuristan today, taking in considerable parts of Badakshan, the Panjshir, Swat and Chitral. The admixture of Greek blood, which gives to many of the inhabitants of Nuristan today a startlingly South European look, had certainly begun long before the arrival of the Macedonian army. All that Alexander’s stragglers did when they encountered the Kafir women, who have the reputation of being sluttish, accommodating and extremely handsome, was to strengthen it.