A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
An improbable—though hilarious—foray into Afghanistan by two Brits in 1956.After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman decides to quit his job, kiss goodbye his wife and children, and mount an ill-conceived exploration of mountainous Afghani hinterlands with an eccentric foreign service friend luxuriating in Rio.After two days of mountain-climbing school in Wales, they drive off toward Kabul. Within weeks they find themselves scaling 19,000-foot mountains, inching up near perpendicular rock with the aid of an instruction manual.Along the way they are accused of vehicular homicide and beset by dysentery. They endure thirst, hunger and near death on icy precipices. They insult the natives and each other.The subsequent account of these travels and travails, now in print for some fifty years, has influenced countless other bumbling travel writers. You can hear its echoes clearly—in concept, structure and humor—in Bill Bryson’s recent bestseller, A Walk in the Woods.As rude as many an ugly American abroad, Newby and companion Hugh Carless angrily berate a Mullah who has just immersed their camera and packaged food in a river, and tell mocking Pathans to “____ off!” Carless cuffs a Tajik boy for purposefully leading them astray, only later to discover him the son of their chieftain host. They argue continuously with their balking Afghani packmen and between themselves.Somehow they blunder on toward their whimsical destination, Nuristan, where no Englishman has set foot for 60 years. Facing for the first time sheer, ice-covered rock in a looming mountain, the blasé Carless remarks:“It’s nothing but a rock climb, really.”“I can see that.”“Just a question of technique.”A commodity of which they seemingly possess little.Carless, who speaks fluent Persian, chafes Newby for his slow uptake with the language. Secretly studying a dubious language guide, Newby memorizes “basic” phrases, such as “I saw a corpse in the field.” Sadly, this phrase has occasion for use, when they discover a young traveler on the road “who has lost everything,” his skull bashed in with a rock.Danger lurks everywhere for these unarmed and blithely confident Brits: not only crevasses and precipices but also thieves, bears, disease. Both Newby and Carless suffer from dysentery most of their hike and often go thirsty rather than drink from cool, inviting streams. Particularly after discovering the source of their contamination:“‘You know those little huts they build over the streams,’ I said. There was one outside our house, built over the stream from which the drinking water was fetched. It was a pretty little hut; Hugh had particularly admired it. He called it a gazebo.“‘What about them?’“‘I’ve found out what they’re for. No wonder we’re getting worse.’”To spin his seductive and tickling narrative, Newby employs understatement, self-effacement, savage wit, honed irony, and unrelenting honesty. The result is a web of foible, reluctant courage, stupidity, and curiosity—i.e., a human story, into which we are drawn by his endearingly flawed humanity.At the center, however, always lies Newby’s curiosity. It impels him on his trip and keeps him trudging on despite bad food, bad water, bad weather, sleepless nights, blisters, scrapes, and threats to his life. He gives precise, detailed descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna—including the human animal: the Tajiks, Pathans, Kafirs, Rajputs, and others he encounters along the way. As when, at night, he enters a desolate Afghani town:“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.”But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is by no means a trifle, all laughs and landscape. Newby also recounts Afghan history, now made even more pertinent by the war there. Such as the 1895 forced conversion of tribal pantheists to Islam—this done with the swords of Abdur Rahman’s armies. Further, if one wanted to get an intimate picture of tribal life in Afghanistan before the onslaught of war three decades ago, this would be an excellent place to start.A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush launched Newby on a career as one of Britain’s best and best-read travel writers.
Page 166 of the Picador edition of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ranks among the funniest things I've ever read. On it, Newby quotes from a phrasebook of the Afghan Bashgali language, which apparently contains opening gambits like 'How long have you had a goitre?', 'I have nine fingers; you have ten', 'A dwarf has come to ask for food' and 'I have an intention to kill you', which made me laugh so hard I actually dropped my copy of the book. One day I hope to lay my hands on the phrasebook from which Newby quotes here. Which may prove hard, as it's over 100 years old and devilishly obscure.While not as hilarious as the quotes listed above, the rest of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush -- about the author's impromptu trip to Afghanistan's Nuristan region, one of the most inaccessible parts of the world -- is pretty damn entertaining, too. You see, the road from Kabul to Nuristan is rather mountainous, and the author and his companion aren't exactly experienced mountaineers. They are an haute couture salesman and a career diplomat, respectively, whose only serious climbing experience prior to setting off for Afghanistan is a two-day crash course in Wales. Needless to say, this leaves them woefully unprepared for the majesty of Mir Samir, a tall and windy peak they have vowed to climb. Their misadventures on the mountain, described in a witty, self-deprecating and quintessentially British style, make for interesting reading. So does the rest of their trip. The book gets off to a slow (albeit entertaining) start, but once the actual expedition gets under way, it gets better with every page. Newby is an excellent writer with a keen eye for character, beauty and absurd dialogue. His descriptions of the scenery and the eccentric characters they come across are superb, as are his underplayed but impressive tales of woe. And boy, do the author and his friend come to woe. Yet despite the setbacks they persevere, and in the end they're rewarded for their perseverance with a chance encounter with the great explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who kindly calls them a couple of pansies.If I have any quibbles with the book, they concern the ending, which is rather abrupt and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The rest of the book, however, is excellent, especially the second half. Highly recommended to armchair travellers and real explorers alike.
What do You think about A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush (1999)?
A short note to a friend in the Foreign Service inquiring about where to go for holiday led to a lifetime as a travel writer for Eric Newby. Although previously employed in advertising, on a sailing ship, and for many years in the wholesale fashion business, an expedition to Afghanistan (then Nuristan) in the mid-1950s with his friend Hugh Carliss led to Newby's classic travelogue. The foibles of these two plucky and utterly overmatched Englishmen make for a superbly fun read, filled with the tragic fatalism at which the English are so adept while they doggedly drag themselves through breathtaking landscapes where few Englishmen had ever gone. After a certain point in their journey they know they are going to die, but they find solace in the fact that they at least have a few tins of jam and crackers left and stoically await their fate, which, fortunately, never comes.A wonderful piece of writing, both witty and insightful, which gives a rare look at Afghanistan before the travails of the 1980s to the present, as seen through the eyes of two utterly fascinated and totally ill-prepared Englishmen who wanted nothing more than a "short walk" through one of the more remote landscapes on our planet.
—Steven Hargrove
This book was published 1957 years ago by Eric Newby who was a great travel writer at the time. This book covers a trip to the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan that Mr. Newby and his friend took around 1952. If you like dry, British humor, this is the funniest book you'll ever read. It's a serious account of the trip, yet it's very droll.It covers a region of the world that, while very much in the news today because of the violence perpetuated currently, was a very exotic yet gentle destination more than half a century ago.This book is one of my all-time favorites. If you can't find a copy easily, go to www.abebooks.com and find a copy from an independent bookseller.
—Drusha
A delightfully understated and hilariously funny account of what must have been a very serious undertaking. Fraught with danger, the author, seems not to notice as he stays ahead of death by the narrowest of margins. Where the rest of us, mere mortals that we are, may feel compelled to describe the tortuous hunger or the withering cold, Newby is moved to remark on an attractive butterfly which catches his eye, or an amusing incident regarding his boot . Similar in narrative style to Jerome K. Jerome's classic tales of less arduous adventures elsewhere (in a boat and on a bummel) this description of a brave expedition into largely unknown territory serves as an inspiration to all those of us consider the world a friendly place full of friends we simply haven't yet had a chance to meet. Buy or borrow this book, it will leave you astonished that such an adventure was undertaken with so little in the way of experience and equipment and richer for allowing Newby's self depreciating manner to enter your thoughts.
—Clive Walker
