A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
by Eric Newby
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eric NewbyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-01
ISBN: 1741795281
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Book Reviews of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Book Review: Classic British travel writing--and humor
Summary: 5 Stars
After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman Eric Newby 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 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 two decades ago, this would be an excellent place to start.
Summary of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
The view was colossal. Below us on every side mountain surged away it seemed forever; we looked down on glaciers and snow-covered peaks that perhaps no one has ever seen before, except from the air.'Feeling restless in the world of London's high-fashion industry, Eric Newby asked a friend to accompany him on a mountain-climbing expedition in the wild and remote Hindu Kush, in north-eastern Afghanistan. And so they went - although they did stop first for four days of climbing lessons in Wales - becoming the first Englishmen to visit this spectacular region for more than half a century. Newby's frank and funny account of their expedition to what is still amongst the world's most isolated areas is one of the classics of travel writing.
For more than a decade following the end of World War II, Eric Newby toiled away in the British fashion industry, peddling some of the ugliest clothes on the planet. (Regarding one wafer-thin model in her runway best, he was reminded of "those flagpoles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.") Fortunately, Newby reached the end his haute-couture tether in 1956. At that point, with the sort of sublime impulsiveness that's forbidden to fictional characters but endemic to real ones, he decided to visit a remote corner of Afghanistan, where no Englishman had planted his brogans for at least 50 years. What's more, he recorded his adventure in a classic narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The title, of course, is a fine example of Newby's habitual self-effacement, since his journey--which included a near-ascent of the 19,800-foot Mir Samir--was anything but short. And his book seems to furnish a missing link between the great Britannic wanderers of the Victorian era and such contemporary jungle nuts as Redmond O'Hanlon.
At times it also brings to mind Evelyn Waugh, who contributed the preface. Newby is a less acidulous writer, to be sure, and he has little interest in launching the sort of heat-seeking satiric missiles that were Waugh's specialty. Still, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a hilarious read. The author excels at the dispiriting snapshot, capturing, say, the Afghan backwater of Fariman in two crisp sentences: "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." His capsule history of Nuristan also gets in some sly digs at Britain's special relationship with the violence-prone Abdur Rahman:
Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken.Newby also surpasses Waugh--and indeed, most other travel writers--in another important respect: he's miraculously free of solipsism. Even the keenest literary voyagers tend to be, in the purest sense of the term, self-centered. But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes wonderfully oblique portraits of the author's travel companion, Hugh Carless, and his wife, Wanda (who plays a starring role in such subsequent chronicles as Slowly down the Ganges). There are also dozens of brilliant cameo parts, and an indelible record of a stunning landscape. The roof of the world is, in Newby's rendering, both an absolute heaven and a low-oxygen hell. Yet the author never pretends to pit himself against a malicious Nature--his mountains are, in Frost's memorable phrase, too lofty and original to rage. Which is yet another reason to call this little masterpiece a peak performance. --James Marcus
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