TRAVEL WRITING
Call of the wild
SHELLEY WALIA
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Combining humour and self-mockery with an intimacy with mountains – a masterly narrative.
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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; Eric Newby; London; Picador Rs.295.
Let me admit at the outset that I had not heard of Eric Newby until I stumbled across the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush of which the preface is written by Evelyn Waugh. Having extensively read and researched on Waugh, and
being an enthusiast myself of river rafting and mountaineering, I was naturally attracted to the book for its narrative skill and of course the breathtaking love of adventure. Published in 1958, Picador has to be complimented for bringing out the 50th anniversary edition of a book that has rightly found its place at the top alongside the travel writings of Marco Polo, Apsley Cherry-Gerrard and William Clark in the National Geographic ratings of the ‘Greatest Adventure Books of All Time’.
Tourist spots passe
Waugh finds it difficult to imagine this ‘stalwart young adventurer selling women’s clothes’. After a heroic career in the army and a formidable voyage of the first Grain Race from England to Australia via Cape Horn and back, it was difficult to imagine such a lover of the outdoors join the most ‘improbable of trades, haute couture’.
Let us believe that he was at large and took up the profession of his father. It is interesting to note that he was neither a sailor nor a mountain climber, but being a hardcore romantic, he could not resist the ‘call of the wild’. For him, as Waugh explains, the much visited tourist spots were passé; he would rather explore the unfrequented, the unknown. In 1942 as part of a military detachment he had been sent on an operation to destroy a German airfield in Sicily. Taken unawares by a strong force of 1,000 German troops guarding the airfield, the entire English party was captured. Between 1942 and 1943, Newby was held prisoner of war in a camp at Fontanellato, in the Po Valley. His escape from prison and the time he spent in Italy is described in his most well-known book Love and War in the Apennine, a splendid sequence of events covering the guerrilla warfare against the Germans in Italy, his chance meeting with Wanda, the girl he returned to find at the end of the war and whom he later married. Back in London after a stint in the M9 followed by a job with a publisher, he found himself in his father’s business of selling clothes.
And so it happened that one fine day when he realized that selling women’s undergarments was not his calling, he decided to go on this adventure to the wild terrain of the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan much in keeping with the age old tradition of the Englishmen who would risk anything to get away from their England. Newby, on taking this abrupt decision, immediately sent off a telegram to his diplomat friend in Rio de Jenerio, one Hugh Carless: ‘Can you travel Nuristan June?’ The affirmative reply arrived promptly a few days later. In the correspondence that followed for a couple of weeks, Newby is taken aback by the enormous theoretical knowledge of Hugh who sent him intricate details of their plan as well as the mountain equipment they would need. But on the arrival of his friend, his confidence in him stands shattered as he discovers that he has no experience whatsoever of mountain-climbing. Ill-prepared and lacking any expertise, Newby and his friend Hugh Carless set out to climb Mir Samir, a gruelling glacial peak of 20,000feet in the Nuristan Mountains of Afghanistan. Nuristan, as many would know, lies in the North East of Afghanistan, enclosed by the Hindu Kush. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was known as Kafiristan, a land rabidly patriarchal and religiously fundamentalist.
Uproarious incidents
The location is mesmerising in that our novice mountaineers find themselves among roving inhabitants of Nuristan, a community that only recently has been forced to adopt Islam, probably the ‘last mass forced conversion in history’. In keeping with the usual practice of English anthropologists, Newby too is rather parochial in his account of the natives and their idiosyncrasies and seems fascinated with the last vestiges of the English Empire palpable in this land. Their adventure throws up uproarious incidents of mishaps and slip-ups, the account of which forms the matter of this delightful and witty book. His narrative skills are apparent in his description of the landscape : ‘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.’ Or the evocation of the history of Nuristan and the relationship of the British with the Amir of Afghanistan: ‘Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakh 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 is a literary travel writer par excellence, leaving behind a blaze of fun and laughter, memory and forgetting. The book is indeed, reminiscent of Waugh’s writings that draw attention to the self-disparaging and unassuming foolhardiness of the English, a quality that is essential for a genre that otherwise would lose its comic underpinnings to a dull autobiographical narrative of adventure.
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