In Nuristan with Carless

Twenty years ago, I was due to give a talk at the Travellers Club about a recent expedition. I thought it would be much more entertaining for everyone if my friend Ned spoke about the perils of travelling with a travel writer. Eventually we also invited the retired diplomat Hugh Carless, a fellow victim, to talk about his own dire experiences at the hands of Eric Newby in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958). By then in his late seventies, Carless was charming, extremely modest and very funny. Rather unkindly, I thought, someone asked if his Foreign Office career had ever recovered from his merciless treat­ment. He laughed uncomfortably.

Newby died a few years later, followed in 2012 by Carless. Today my copy of A Short Walk sits on my desk, its cover and spine as crum­pled and weather-beaten as its late author in his octogenarian dotage. Inside the cover it is inscribed in faded biro:

Silvio Marozzi Tripoli Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya 1st March 1986

I don’t know why my father used the full, bombastic name for Gaddafi’s Libya (I suspect it was out of caution while working in this unpredictable dictatorship), but I do know that Eric Newby’s comic masterpiece was one of his favourite and best-loved books, a master­class in travel writing. He must have passed this Picador edition on to me shortly afterwards because I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have it. And every time I look at it, it reminds me I should have been much more ruthless about Ned, who got off very lightly when compared with Carless. First published in 1958, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush has long since acquired mythic status. Hundreds of thousands of paperbacks have been sold around the world, and readers continue to be charmed by its big-hearted embrace of overseas adventure, its hapless amateur­ishness, its quintessentially British self-deprecation (is there another nation on earth that boasts so relentlessly about its modesty?) and its delicious humour. Two bored Brits, without a shred of mountaineering experience between them, decide on a whim to attempt an unclimbed 19,000-foot peak in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. What could possibly go wrong? Its celebrated ending, which we shall come to later, has taken its place on the same pedestal of remote literary encounters as Henry Morton Stanley’s ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Let’s deal with the humour first and state from the outset that this is a very funny book. Many of us may wince at the expression ‘laugh-out-loud’, but during my latest rereading of the book in bed, I immediately began to annoy my wife (not an uncommon situation) by bursting into laughter every few minutes. The best way to counter her irritation, it seemed to me, was to read out the particular passage. For once I was right, and we were both in hysterics. The same is true, incidentally, of Newby’s outrageously funny memoir, Something Wholesale, an account of his decade-long dalli­ance with the rag trade. The end of that career in couture, an unlikely postscript for a man who had fought with distinction in the Special Boat Service during the war, was the springboard for his ‘short walk’. ‘CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?’ Newby telegrammed Carless in Rio de Janeiro. With a three-word reply – ‘OF COURSE HUGH’ – the adventure was on. If the book’s title is a sit-up-and-take-notice pointer to the richly self-effacing Newby style (to call this brutal expedition a short walk is to test understatement to breaking point), the chapter headings follow the same direction. Chapter 1 is ‘Life of a Salesman’, swiftly juxtaposed with Chapter 2’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ and the irrepress­ible, phoenix-like Chapter 3: ‘Birth of a Mountain Climber’. Newby discovers with horror the true extent of Carless’s moun­taineering ambitions in an increasingly voluminous correspondence recommending the purchase of large quantities of specialist equip­ment. Newbie Newby has second thoughts.

I told Wanda my wife. ‘I think he’s insane,’ she said, ‘just dotty. What will happen if you say no?’ ‘I already have but he doesn’t take any notice.’

After a four-day crash course in mountaineering in Wales, where they learn the rudimentary arts of ropework and belaying, it’s off to Turkey for the overland journey to Afghanistan, Wanda in tow for the initial leg. At this point a word or two about Carless is in order. He has the distinction in these pages, unfortunate for him but gloriously enter­taining for readers, of serving that essential literary role: the Travel Writer’s Foil. With a few strokes of Newby’s pen he becomes the right-thinking, inflexible, impatient, occasionally stern British official, forever saying things like ‘We must leave at once.’ The straight-man set pieces are brilliantly done, the joshing remorseless. Newby is never careless with Carless. After a navigating blunder which leaves them undiplomatically close to the Russian border with a car full of cameras, telescopes, compasses and maps, Carless is determined to turn around.

We argued with him in the growing darkness, even made fun of him, but it was of no use, he was beyond the reach of humour. On his face was a look that I had never seen. He spoke with an air of absolute certainty, like a man under the influence of drugs. Like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows picking up the scent of his old home, Hugh was in direct contact with the Foreign Office, SW1, and the scent was breast-high.

Arriving at last in Kabul, they discover the government has assigned them a guide for their assault on the elusive peak of Mir Samir. The Afghan’s qualifications appear dubious. He has just returned from riding around the world on a bicycle.

Against my will I found myself conducting a sort of viva voce examination of this formidable being. ‘Have you had any previous climbing experience?’ ‘None at all,’ he said, and my heart warmed to him. ‘But I did run in the ten thousand metres in the Asian Games,’ he added modestly.

Travelling through Tajik country up the Panjshir valley with Abdul Ghiyas, a more suitable guide, they make camp at 8,000 feet one night and Carless regales, at considerable length, a local mullah and various horse drivers with his previous adventures.

Hugh was telling an interminable story, something from South America, about an anaconda killing a horse. To express it in classical Persian was heavy going; judging by the look of almost hysterical concentration on the faces of his audience it was pretty difficult for them too.

Inevitably the British travellers’ health deteriorates. Frazzled with heat, racked with thirst and drop-dead exhausted, they down draughts of local water. Then Carless, who perversely considers himself immune to water-borne disease, reluctantly admits to being unwell.

‘Diarrhoea. It’s most unusual.’ ‘I’m not a bit surprised. It’s all this filthy water we’re drinking.’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with the water.’ ‘Perhaps we’re not strong enough for it.’ ‘You have to get used to it.’ ‘Like old women drinking meths?’

It is a tragedy that, thanks to the series of wars that have raged more or less continuously in Afghanistan since the ill-fated Soviet invasion of 1979, many in the West today equate the country with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and terrorism. That is like judging the UK exclusively through the prism of its relationship with the EU. It is worth emphasizing the sheer heart-stopping beauty of the country and the humbling hospitality of its people, which completely captivate travellers. Newby was no exception and, comic precision aside, his prose sings with a finely tuned sense of place. Up and up the Panjshir they slog until, one evening, turning a corner in the road, ‘suddenly we were in paradise . . . poplars shim­mered; willows bowed in the breeze; water flowed slowly in the irrigation ditches through a hundred gardens, among apricot trees with the fruit still heavy on them, submerging the butts of the mul­berries, whose owners squatted in their properties and viewed the scene with satisfaction’. It was like ‘some golden age of human hap­piness’ which communicated its magic to all who were there. Not for nothing is this wild eastern region known as Nuristan, Land of Light. Snatches of history, geography and nature writing maintain the narrative thrust, but laconic humour is the thread that binds it all together. One morning they spy a vast, snow-covered peak at the top of the Darra Ghuzu valley. An old man sitting by the road asks where they are going.

‘Kuh-i-Mir Samir. We are going to climb it.’ ‘Ghuzu’, he said, pointing to the impressive pinnacle, ‘is nothing but a child. Kuh-i-Mir Samir is a great mountain. It is quite vertical. No man can reach the summit.’ For some time we plodded on in silence while I digested this unpalatable information.

Without giving the game away, the improbable high-altitude adventures continue until they reach their natural conclusion and it is time to come down. And so to the end. In the lower reaches of the Panjshir, where the river thunders through a great gorge, Carless spots the Edwardian explorer Wilfred Thesiger and his motley cara­van. The last three pages of the book build up to a magnificent crescendo dominated by the mid-forty-some­thing Old Etonian surrounded by wooden presses and tin trunks marked ‘British Museum’. One moment he is pondering his men’s chances of sur­vival (‘That cook’s going to die,’ said Thesiger; ‘hasn’t got a coat and look at his feet’), the next he’s channelling his inner curmudgeon (‘England’s going to pot’) and finally he’s re-living his triumphs as a self-appointed doctor.

‘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.’

They turn in for the night and Newby delivers his final flourish.

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.

Given the pitiless, hysterical lampooning of Carless, perhaps it is just as well that Newby dedicated the book to his friend with a generous acknowledgement of his starring role. ‘This book is dedicated to Hugh Carless of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service, without whose determination, it must be obvious to anyone who reads it, this journey could never have been made.’ Although Love and War in the Apennines, the story of his wartime experiences in the Italian mountains, is generally considered a finer book, by both Newby fans and Newby himself, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush thrust him decisively into the first rank of travel writers. After that false start in fashion, it put the afterburners on his career as a writer. Whether it performed the diplomatic equivalent for Carless of the Foreign Office must surely be a moot point.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 74 © Justin Marozzi 2022