A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

by Eric Newby

  Here Abdul Ghiyas bought a chicken from a smelly old man and salted it for dinner. We shared two apple puddings between us. Although a very long way from home an end-of-term air pervaded the party.

  The old man decided to accompany us up the valley, thereby adding materially to our discomfort. Never in my short acquaintance with Asia had I encountered anyone or anything, dead or alive, who smelled like this old man. Although I couldn’t say why, he reminded me of the Crimean War.

  ‘He is a Tajik,’ Abdul Ghiyas explained, as if it was an extenuation. ‘Twenty years ago he came over the Pass with some merchants and got left behind. He has been here ever since.’

  ‘If he smelled like he does now twenty years ago,’ Hugh grumbled, ‘I can’t say I blame them.’

  We were climbing high along the side of the gorge now. Its far bank was in shadow and there were the scours of waterfalls and patches of old snow. Abdul Ghiyas was very ill. We noticed that whenever there was an opportunity, which was frequently, he drank the water from the stream. We told him that if he continued to do so he would die.

  I dreamt of all the cool drinks I had ever had in my life. The ginger beer I had drunk as a child; foaming lager; draught Worthington; Muscadet kept in a stream until I was ready for it; pints of Pimms; buckets of ice …

  There were clouds now, hemming in the sun but not obscuring it, concentrating it on our heads like a burning glass. All the time, to windward, was the awful old man whose clothes were like cerements.

  ‘I wish to God he’d go away,’ I said at last.

  Hugh’s reaction to this was even more violent.

  ‘If there weren’t any witnesses, do you know what I’d do? I’d push him over the edge.’

  At last the sun began to sink and, as it grew cooler, we came to Linar. On the outskirts of the village grew a magnificent mulberry tree, shāhtūt, loaded with fruit.

  As the only really fit man left among us and as a punishment for his behaviour at the lake, Shir Muhammad was ordered to remain behind to collect a basketful. The last we saw of him was swinging aloft in the branches like a great overgrown schoolboy.

  In the village Abdul Ghiyas halted. ‘I have an aunt in Linar,’ he said. ‘Here we should stop the night.’

  At this moment angry cries rose on the air from the direction of the shāhtūt tree. It was obvious that Shir Muhammad had been caught by the owner.

  ‘Perhaps after all,’ Abdul Ghiyas went on, ‘it is better to continue.’

  As we passed through the inhabitants of Linar turned out in force. They were a wild-looking independent lot. For some reason they took exception to Abdul Ghiyas in his windproof suit. They left the rest of us alone, but, as Abdul Ghiyas lumbered up the road, they treated him to a sort of slow handclap.

  The air began to grow cold. A few miles farther on the track descended sharply and at the junction with another valley, the Makhin Kadao down which an icy wind was howling, Abdul Ghiyas halted.

  ‘It is time to camp.’

  It was a crazy, windy place to choose for a camp. Without saying anything Hugh hurled his ice-axe to the ground and set off alone up the Makhin Kadao. There he sat down at the foot of a cliff with his back to us. I must say that at this moment he had my sympathy.

  Whilst we were standing in the middle of the gorge in some indecision, Shir Muhammad came stumbling down the hill towards us. His nose was bleeding and he had a beautiful black eye. He had apparently been caught up the tree by the owner, an old woman, who had summoned her son and two hefty daughters. They had given him a fearful beating. He had also lost the basket, but he still had his shirt full of shāhtūt, although they were a bit squashed.

  Mustering this sad, mutinous little force, I drove them before me up the Linar gorge, cursing the lot of them. It was not difficult for me to work up a rage at this moment. All of a sudden I felt that revulsion against an alien way of life that anyone who travels in remote places experiences from time to time. I longed for clean clothes; the company of people who meant what they said, and did it. I longed for a hot bath and a drink.

  The track immediately climbed a thousand feet out of the bottom of the gorge. Whenever we came to a small table of level ground that might accommodate two men without horses, Abdul Ghiyas suggested that we should stop. He was very sick but we had to go on until we found a suitable place.

  ‘Seb. Here!’

  ‘No! GET ON!’

  After a long hour we came to a fine place; close to the river and with fresh water from a spring.

  ‘Abdul Ghiyas!’

  ‘Seb?’

  ‘What about this? Good place.’

  ‘The old man says there is a better farther on.’

  The old man, now that he was cooling off in the streaming Asian wind, was less objectionable.

  When it was dark, after being twelve hours on the march we came to the place recommended by the old man. He was right; it had been worth the extra effort. Almost immediately Hugh arrived. He seemed in excellent spirits. The men ate their delicious chicken; we ate horrid tinned bacon-and-egg mixture and delicious apple pudding and some of the shāhtūt that had survived the battle at Linar. As a result of enjoying this modest feast Hugh was very ill.

  Without their pipe, which had broken down, and having still a little tobacco, Badar Khan and Shir Muhammad constructed a pipe from mother earth, boring a hole in the ground for the bowl and connecting it by an underground passage with another smaller one that served as the mouthpiece. They applied their lips to the ground, sucking horribly. It was a disagreeable spectacle.

  On August the first, early in the morning, we reached Achagaur, the last village in Nuristan.

  The men of Achagaur all wore heavy sleeveless knitted pullovers with a sophisticated pattern of black and white dicing on them. They gave us melted butter and bread. We gave them Irish stew. Here they still spoke the Katir.

  ‘We are Koreish Katirs,’ they said, ‘from Arabia, as are the Linar people of the same tribe as the Prophet.’

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘We cannot tell. We do not know.’1

  We asked them how they traded with the Panjshir people.

  ‘We meet them beyond the Arayu – in a lonely place. They bring us salt and we exchange butter for it.’

  Up beyond the last houses the valley of the Linar was nothing like the Chamar Valley. Because the bottom of the valley was blocked with stones, there was hardly any grass and therefore there were few cattle and sheep. The last dwelling of all high up in the valley was the herdsman’s hut and from it a family sprawled out who themselves looked like animals.

  To the left, in the direction of the Panjshir, the valley swung round and became a vast cul-de-sac of peaks. Straight ahead, far up the valley and high above us, was the Arayu Pass, like a funnel with a track winding interminably up through it. To think that this was one of the principal butter routes out of Nuristan into Panjshir was a sobering thought.

  All of us, proprietors and drivers, even Shir Muhammad, were now ill. For this reason our caravan presented a curiously scattered appearance, as it wound its way up the dreadful slope, exposed to wind and sun and the whistles of the marmots who were out in force among the rocks. As one or the other of us succumbed, a ruthless atmosphere prevailed; no one waited for anyone else and those who had fallen out had to catch up as best they could when they finally emerged, green-faced, from behind the inadequate boulders that covered the lower slopes.

  The climb began in earnest at a quarter to ten and took three hours. The last few hundred feet were moraine and the way through it was marked by cairns, two stones on top of one another. But it was worth all the suffering. Once again, as on the Chamar, we stood on the great dividing ridge of the whole massif. To the left the ridge plunged down in snow-covered slopes straight into a glacial lake; to the right of the col the mountains were smoother, more rounded. Ahead was Mir Samir.

  Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, w
here the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.

  We went down towards the north, following the cairns and later the stream from the top of the watershed, with the cold yellow mountains all about us standing alone, like sentinels.

  It was mid-afternoon before we stopped. In spite of everything, I was mad with hunger. Hugh, having a queasy feeling, was more finicky.

  ‘It’s your turn to cook,’ he said. ‘I want green tea and two boiled eggs.’

  ‘Well, I want a damn great meal.’

  There was a screaming wind. Boiling water at 15,000 feet or thereabouts is a protracted operation using nothing but solid fuel. Whilst I was waiting for the egg water to boil, I fried two eggs in thirty seconds and ate an entire apple pudding, cold.

  Hugh looked like death but he was in a fury. At first I thought he would have some kind of seizure.

  ‘Look at you. Hogging it. You only think of yourself. When are you going to cook something decent for me?’

  ‘You asked for boiled eggs. I can’t think of anything more difficult at this height. You can cook them yourself and anything else you want in the future.’

  I set off over the green grass down the valley alone.

  In spite of this ridiculous tiff, rarely in my life had I felt such an ecstatic feeling of happiness as I did coming down from the Arayu. The present was bliss beyond belief; the future looked golden. I thought of my wife and children; I thought of the book that I had already written; I even thought about the Everest Foundation and the grant that up here seemed certain to materialize (it didn’t – one can hardly blame them).

  I went down past high, cold cliffs already in shadow where the first tented nomads were, down and down for two hours.

  Eventually I came out in a great green meadow with a river running through it like a curled spring. The sun was just setting, the grass that had been a vivid green had already lost its colour, the sky was the colour of pearls.

  Under the wall of the mountain on the left there were four rocks, each forty feet high and fifty long; built out from under them were the stone houses and pens of the summer aylaq. Women and children dressed in white were standing on the roofs watching the herds come slowly down from the fringes of the mountain. Standing in the river two bullocks were fighting.

  Before going to the aylaq I waited for Hugh to appear.

  ‘You know I’ve had the most extraordinary feeling coming down,’ were his first words when he appeared. ‘As if there was never going to be anything to worry about again.’

  ‘I expect it’s the altitude.’

  The night was a bitter one. The wind howled over the screes but we dined on rice pudding (the rice was provided by the headman, our own provisions were exhausted) and, although we were blinded by the smoke of the artemnesia root, we were content to be where we were.

  All through the next day we still had the same feeling of extreme happiness. Until late in the afternoon we went down; always with the great bone-coloured mountains on either side and valleys choked with the debris of glaciers, leading to regions of snow and ice and to rocks too sheer for snow to cling to them.

  We came to cornfields and a village called Arayu, full of savage dogs and surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses like those of Egyptian fellahin.

  This patch of cultivation was succeeded by a mighty red-cliffed gorge where there were caves in which we sheltered from the midday sun. But not for long. The path to Parian and Shāhnaiz led up out of it high over the mountain. At the watershed we turned still more to the north going downhill again now and into a final narrow valley where the wind threw the spray from a river in our faces. It was spray from the Parian, the Upper Panjshir. We had made it.

  We crossed the river by a bridge, went up through the village of Shāhnaiz and downhill towards the Lower Panjshir.

  ‘Look,’ said Hugh, ‘it must be Thesiger.’

  Coming towards us out of the great gorge where the river thundered was a small caravan like our own. He named an English explorer, a remarkable throwback to the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who has twice crossed the Empty Quarter and, apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life among primitive peoples.

  We had been on the march for a month. We were all rather jaded; the horses were galled because the drivers were careless of them, and their ribs stood out because they had been in places only fit for mules and forded innumerable torrents filled with slippery rocks as big as footballs; the drivers had run out of tobacco and were pining for their wives; there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the third time; all of us suffered from a persistent dysentery. The ecstatic sensations we had experienced at a higher altitude were beginning to wear off. It was not a particularly gay party.

  Thesiger’s caravan was abreast of us now, his horses lurching to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked ‘British Museum’, and black tin trunks (like the ones my solicitors have, marked ‘Not Russel-Jones’ or ‘All Bishop of Chichester’).

  The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for Central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter.

  ‘Turn round,’ he said, ‘you’ll stay the night with us. We’re going to kill some chickens.’

  We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul, that we wanted our mail, but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village.

  Soon we were sitting on a carpet under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger’s belongings piled up behind us.

  ‘Can’t speak a word of the language,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it’s not really necessary. Here, you,’ he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. ‘Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice – three chickens.’

  ‘No good bothering the interpreter,’ he went on, ‘the poor fellow’s got a sty, that’s why we only did seventeen miles today. It’s no good doing too much at first, especially as he’s not feeling well.’

  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.

  Soon the cook was back, semaphoring desperately.

  ‘Speak up, can’t understand a thing. You want sugar? Why don’t you say so?’ He produced a large bunch of keys, like a housekeeper in some stately home. All that evening he was opening and shutting boxes so that I had tantalizing glimpses of the contents of an explorer’s luggage – a telescope, a string vest, the Charterhouse of Parma, Du Côté de Chez Swann, some fish-hooks and the 1/1000000 map of Afghanistan – not like mine, a sodden pulp, but neatly dissected, mounted between marbled boards.

  ‘That cook’s going to die,’ said Thesiger; ‘hasn’t got
a coat and look at his feet. We’re nine thousand feet if we’re an inch here. How high’s the Chamar Pass?’ We told him 16,000 feet. ‘Get yourself a coat and boots, do you hear?’ he shouted in the direction of the camp fire.

  After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious. Famished, we wrestled with the bones in the darkness.

  ‘England’s going to pot,’ said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter’s King Size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. ‘Look at this shirt, I’ve only had it three years, now it’s splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas – wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.’

  He began to tell me about his Arabs.

  ‘I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing.’ I asked him about surgery. ‘I take off fingers and there’s a lot of surgery to be done; they’re frightened of their own doctors because they’re not clean.’

  ‘Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?’

  ‘Hundreds of them,’ he said dreamily, for it was very late. ‘Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.

  ‘Let’s turn in,’ he said.

  The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger.

  * * *

  1. This was nonsense. They all looked like Rajputs, and are – descendants of the Keruch Rajputs of the Indus Valley.

  Epilogue to the 50th Anniversary Edition

  BY HUGH CARLESS

  Well, what became of us ‘couple of pansies’ and our three Tajik companions? The short answer is that early next morning we took leave of Wilfred Thesiger and hurried down the Panjshir valley to Jangalak. Abdul Ghiyas had ridden ahead to warn his family to prepare tea and food. They gave us a memorable meal, served in the same cool green riverside garden where we had begun our journey in the Hindu Kush some weeks before. Each man had his own pot of tea and was handed a plate of eggs together with a round of delicious flat bread which had been fried in precious butter. To follow came a basket filled with the last of the season’s mulberries, cooled and cleaned by dipping in the swift-flowing river. After lunch the paying-off ceremony, the counting of dozens of bank notes, was conducted in view of a fascinated crowd who had gathered in the garden. Then we said farewell to companions who had by now become our friends.