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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

1999Eric Newby

4.6/5

A great classic in adventure travel writing, sort of a precursor cross between Theroux and Bryson. A Mayfair fashion executive, who moonlights as a magazine travel editor, reaches out to a Foreign Service buddy in 1956 to travel to the remote Afghanistan province of Nuristan and attempt to scale an unclimbed mountain in the Hindu Kush. It has a nice balance of humor, dangerous thrills, and personal encounters with fascinating geography and peoples. Entertaining with little lightning flashes of experience that seem to elucidate the human condition, both its wonders and its follies.The start of this memoir was particularly fun. We join Newby amid the chaos of his company preparing for an upcoming big fashion show, including usable models of impossible dresses for the runway and catalogues. In the middle of this mayhem, Newby suddenly reports sending a cable to his friend Hugh Carless at his job with the State Department in Rio de Janeiro:.CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?It had taken me ten years to discover what everyone had been telling me all along, that the Fashion Industry was not for me.From this launch point comes a perfect example of Newby’s deft skills in capturing characters with a flurry of impressions and metaphors. Her is his first sight of a pushy female buyer from New York City in the process of disrupting company operations with her histrionics and scehemes:Miss Candlemass was about nine feet high and hidden behind smoked glasses in mauve frames studded with semi-precious metal. She was like a lath, with very long legs, just too thin to be healthy, but she was very hygienic, smelled good and had fabulous shoes and stockings. With her dark glasses, the general effect was that of being engaged in watching an eclipse of the earth from the moon. The first embarrassing reality he has to deal with is that Carless may be an obsessive wonder in outfitting their expedition but he has exaggerated his skills in mountain climbing based on a brief excursion to Nuristan when he was with the Kabul embassy. They have to take a detour to Wales for a crash hands-on education led by a trainer they hire and supplemented by peer guidance from a zany pair of intrepid college-age women climbers. It was lots of fun to experience them learning the arts of rappelling and belaying, but we can only shake our heads over their inadequate preparation in mastery of glacier hopping in spikes or in carving ice stairs. After completing a milestone Newby asks the instructor on its difficulty rating:“Moderate.”“How do they go? I’ve forgotten.”“Easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult, severe, very severe, exceptionally severe, and excessively severe.”Getting to Nuristan was half the fun. A big part of the journey was a driving trip from Istanbul to Kabul through thousands of miles of Turkey and Iran and then Afghanistan, followed by a foot journey with horses through high country and many a rickety bridge over streams and gorges. Though Nuristan is located only about 100 miles northeast of Kabul, it is accessible only by passes at 15,000 feet elevation that are closed most of the year. All Hugh’s language skills in Persian and limited Pathan are of little help with the Tajik tribal communities pass through. They are superstitious and fearful about the Kafir people of the Panjshir Valley on the other side of the pass on the plan for crossing. When Carless made his foray, he believed he was the first Brit to go there since 1891. All they have is a British imperial gazetteer entry about how the province was called Kaziristan in 1895, meaning “The Country of the Unbelievers”, i.e. the reclusive descendants of Kazirs, a people who centuries before resisted Islamic conversion by the Ottomans and now were projected as living like bandits and treating women as “practically slaves, being to all intents and purposes bought and sold as household commodities”. The Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan with Newby’s target mountain Mir Shamir in the distance. A horse expedition in the high country near Mir Shamir, showing the rough terrain bordering a glacier similar to that of the trek Newby made.Through all the shenanigans and crises that ensue, we learn a little about the cultures and geography encountered and very little about the flora and fauna. Newby has nice comic timing for his narrative of events. It did feel like a wonder of heroic foolishness for them to get as far as they got, within 300 feet of the top of the 18,000 foot Mir Shamir. His critical asides can sometimes verge on caricature or stereotype in a way that seem a bit politically incorrect by today’s standards. For example, when he imputes menace or laziness or slovenliness in perception of their treatment or actions by the local people encountered on the journey. But I can see the point of wariness over menace in many cases, and the warmth of his heart in general toward people caught in poverty comes through. Also, he is often the ultimate butt of his humor as the one responsible for the insane quest in the first place and mistakes in first impressions. Self-deprecation is the supreme redeeming factor of Newby’s tradition of British humor, which otherwise can challenge its becoming an acquired taste. The tale of this harrowing mission was great entertainment and made me appreciate people and places off the beaten path.

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