A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Read online

  ‘What happens if someone does come off? You can’t just leave them hanging.’

  ‘Send for the fire brigade,’ said Judith.

  Both girls were shuffling their boots on the rock like featherweight boxers.

  Then Pamela was gone, soon to be followed by Hugh.

  After what seemed an eternity it was Judith’s turn. I had her belayed but at this stage it wasn’t much use: I remembered the Doctor’s warning. ‘The leader must not fall off.’ Then she vanished. I continued to pay out the rope. There was a long interval and I heard her shout very distantly to come on and the rope tautened.

  It was impossible to get on to the rock without getting at least one foot wet.

  Very slowly I worked my way out to the corner of the Sepulchre. As I edged round it into what seemed to be empty space I came on to the part with good exposure, the part that always gave Pamela a thrill. Below me was a huge drop to the rocks and as I came round the wind blew my hair into my eyes.

  Two more pitches and we were on the top. I felt a tremendous exaltation. Sitting there on a boulder was a man in a bowler hat and white collar smoking a pipe.

  ‘Early closing in Caernarvon,’ Judith said.

  ‘He looks like an undertaker to me.’

  ‘We shall have to hurry, it’s Pamela’s day to serve tea.’ We went down a wide gully, then raced down the scree to the car. The others were waiting for us. The girls were pleased, so were we. Only the man with the bowler hat weighed on my mind. I asked Hugh if he had seen him.

  ‘Which man? We didn’t see a man.’

  ‘Now you’re making me feel like one of those school-teachers at Versailles.’

  ‘We saw the other party, but we didn’t see a man in a bowler hat.’

  As we were leaving for London, Judith gave me a little pamphlet costing sixpence. It showed, with the aid of pictures, the right and wrong ways of climbing a mountain.

  ‘We haven’t been able to teach you anything about snow and ice,’ she said, ‘but this shows you how to do it. If you find anything on the journey out with snow on it, I should climb it if you get the chance.’

  ‘I wish we were coming with you,’ she added, ‘to keep you out of trouble.’

  ‘So do we,’ we said, and we really meant it. Everyone turned out to say goodbye. It was very heart-warming.

  ‘You know that elderly gentleman who lent you a pair of climbing boots,’ Hugh said, as we drove through the evening sunshine towards Capel Curig.

  ‘You mean Mr Bartrum?’

  ‘Did you know he’s a member of the Alpine Club? He’s written a letter about us to the Everest Foundation. He showed it to me.’

  I asked him what it said.

  ‘He wrote, “I have formed a high opinion of the character and determination of Carless and Newby and suggest that they should be given a grant towards the cost of their expedition to the Hindu Kush.”’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pera Palace

  Eleven days later I arrived with Wanda in Istanbul. As we drove along the last long stretch of road, lurching into the potholes, the Sea of Marmara appeared before us, green and windswept, deserted except for a solitary caique beating up towards the Bosphorus under a big press of sail. Our spirits rose at the thought of seeing Istanbul when the sun was setting, but when we reached the outskirts it was already quite dark. We had planned to enter the city by the Golden Gate on the seaward side, for it sounded romantic and appropriate and we had been stoking ourselves all the way across Europe with the thought of it, not knowing that for several hundred years the gate had been sealed up. Instead we found ourselves on an interminable by-pass lined with luminous advertisements for banks and razor blades. Of the wall constructed by Theodosius there was no sign. It was a fitting end to an uncomfortable journey.

  We left the car in the courtyard of the old Embassy and changed our money with one of the gatekeepers. We asked him where we should stay.

  ‘Star Oteli, clean Oteli, cheap Oteli, good Oteli, Oteli of my brodder.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not so far; take taxi, always taxi. Bad place, at night bad menses and girlses.’

  ‘Order a taxi.’

  He uttered some strange cries. As if by magic a taxi appeared. It was driven by a huge brute with a shaven head; sitting next to him was another smaller man. They were a sinister pair.

  ‘What’s the other one for?’

  ‘He is not for anything. He is brodder.’

  ‘They don’t look like brothers.’

  ‘He is brodder by other woman.’

  With a roar the taxi shot forward. After fifty yards it stopped and the brother opened the door.

  ‘Star Oteli.’

  With sinking hearts we followed him up a nearly vertical flight of stairs to the reception desk. I prayed that the hotel would be full but it wasn’t. We set off down a long brilliantly lit passage, the brother of the gatekeeper leading and the brother of the taxi man bringing up the rear to cut off our retreat. The doors on either side were open, and we could see into the rooms. The occupants all seemed to be men who were lying on their beds fully clothed, gazing at the ceiling. Everywhere, like a miasma, was the unforgettable grave-smell of Oriental plumbing.

  ‘Room with bed for two,’ said the proprietor, flinging open a door at the extreme end. He contrived to invest it with an air of extreme indelicacy, which in no way prepared us for the reality.

  It was a nightmare room, the room of a drug fiend perhaps. It was illuminated by a forty-watt bulb and looked out on a black wall with something slimy growing on it. The bed was a fearful thing, almost perfectly concave. Underneath it was a pair of old cloth-topped boots. The sheets were almost clean but on them there was the unmistakable impress of a human form and they were still warm. In the corner there was a washbasin with one long red hair in it and a tap which leaked. Somewhere nearby a fun-fair was testing its loud-hailing apparatus, warming up for a night of revelry. The smell of the room was the same as the corridor outside with some indefinable additions.

  After the discomforts of the road it was too much. In deep gloom we got back into the taxi. The driver was grinning.

  ‘Pera Palace!’

  As we plunged down the hill through the cavern-like streets, skidding on the tramlines, the brothers screwed their heads round and carried on a tiresome conversation with their backs to the engine.

  ‘Pera very good.’

  Never had a city affected me with such an overpowering sense of melancholy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very good Istanbul.’

  ‘Very good taxi.’ We were heading straight for a tram that was groaning its way up the hill but passed it safely on the wrong side of the road.

  I asked if anyone was ever killed. ‘Many, many, every day.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two million.’

  At the Pera Palace we took a large room. Originally it must have had a splendid view of the Golden Horn, now there was a large building in the way. We sent our clothes to the laundry and went to bed.

  There had been no news of Hugh at the Embassy, but before sinking into a coma of fatigue, we both uttered a prayer that he would be delayed.

  Early on the following morning he was battering on our door. He had just arrived by air and was aggressively fit and clean. Between his teeth was a Dunhill pipe in which some luxurious mixture was burning; under his arm was a clip board full of maps and lists. His clothes had just the right mixture of the elegant and the dashing. He was the epitome of a young explorer. We knew what he would say. It was an expression that we were to hear with ever-increasing revulsion in the weeks to come.

  ‘We must leave at once.’

  ‘We can’t, the wagon’s got to be serviced.’

  ‘I’ve already arranged that. It’ll be ready at noon.’

  Like survivors of an artillery bombardment we were still shaking from the spine-shattering road we had taken through Bulgaria. What the pre-war guide had described as ‘another route�
�.

  ‘It’s been rather a long drive.’ We enumerated the hardships we had undergone, how we had been stripped by customs officials on the Yugoslav frontier, the hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs in the Balkans, the floods, landslips, mosquitoes, all the tedious mishaps of our journey; but lying in our splendid bed we were not objects for obvious sympathy.

  ‘I shall drive. You two can rest.’

  ‘You don’t seem to realize,’ I said, ‘there’s no rest in that machine, there’s so much stuff in it. After a bit we were fighting one another to drive. Besides, damn it, we want to see Istanbul.’

  ‘You can always see Istanbul some other time. It’s been here for two thousand years.’

  ‘You mean you can always see it another time.’

  He looked at his watch reluctantly.

  ‘How long do you want?’

  Only Wanda had the courage to answer. ‘Three days,’ she said.

  We grew fond of the Pera Palace; the beds had big brass knobs on and were really comfortable. Our room seemed the setting for some ludicrous comedy that was just about to begin. Probably it had already been played many times. It was easy to imagine some bearded minister of Abdul Hamid pursuing a fat girl in black stockings and garters round it and hurting himself on the sharp bits of furniture. In the bathroom the bath had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe without recourse to the taps. We watched this process enthralled.

  ‘I think it’s when the current’s running strongly in the Bosphorus.’

  ‘It can’t be that. It’s warm.’

  ‘Why don’t you taste it?’

  ‘I can’t remember whether the Bosphorus is salt or not. Besides it’s a very curious colour sometimes.’

  It was Wanda who discovered the truth. I found her with her ear jammed hard against the wall of the bathroom.

  ‘It’s the man next door. He’s just had a bath. Now he’s pulled out the plug. Here it comes.’

  For the second time that day the bath began to fill silently.

  By contrast the staff were mostly very old and very sad and, apart from our friend in the next bathroom, we never saw anyone. There was a restaurant where we ate interminable meals in an atmosphere of really dead silence. It was the hotel of our dreams.

  Three days later we left Istanbul. The night porter at the Pera Palace had been told to call us at a quarter to four; knowing that he wouldn’t, I willed myself to wake at half past three. I did so but immediately fell into a profound slumber until Hugh arrived an hour later from his modern Oteli up the hill, having bathed, shaved, breakfasted and collected the vehicle. It was not an auspicious beginning to our venture. He told us so.

  There was a long wait for the ferry to take us to Scutari and when it did finally arrive embarkation proceeded slowly. Consumed by an urgent necessity, I asked the ferry master who bowed me into his own splendidly appointed quarters, where I fell into a delightful trance, emerging after what seemed only a moment to see the ferry boat disappearing towards the Asian shore with the motor-car and my ticket. At the barrier there was a great press of people and one of three fine-looking porters stole my wallet. It was the ferry master himself who escorted me on to the next boat, ‘pour tirer d’embarras notre client distingué’ as he ironically put it. For the second time in my life I left Europe penniless.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dying Nomad

  On the road from Istanbul we were detained by a series of misadventures in Armenia. At Horasan, a small one-street town on the Aras river, instead of turning right for Agri and the Persian frontier, Hugh roared straight on. There was a long climb, followed by a descent on hairpin bends into a canyon of red, silver and green cliffs, with a castle perched on the top, down to a village where the air was cool under the trees and women were treading something underfoot in a river, and a level stretch under an overhanging cliff where gangs working on a narrow gauge railway were bringing down avalanches of stones. On the right was the same fast running river.

  We were tired and indescribably dirty. In the last of the sunlight we crossed a green meadow and bathed in a deep pool. It was very cold.

  ‘What river do you think this is?’ Bathed and shaved we sat in the meadow putting on clean socks. Behind a rock, further downstream Wanda was washing her hair.

  ‘It’s the Aras.’

  ‘But the Aras flows west to east; this one’s going in the opposite direction.’

  ‘How very peculiar. What do you make of it?’

  ‘It can’t be the Aras.’

  With night coming down we drove on beside the railway, over a wooden bridge that thundered and shuddered under our weight, through a half-ruined village built of great stone blocks where two men were battering one another to death and the women, black-skirted and wearing white head-scarves, minded their own business, up and up through a ravine with the railway always on our left, into pine forests where the light was blue and autumnal – partisan, Hemingway country, brooding and silent – past a sealed-up looking house, with Hugh’s dreadful radio blaring all the time louder and louder until suddenly we realized that what we were listening to was Russian, crystal clear and getting stronger every minute.

  Hugh stopped the car and switched on the light and we huddled over the map, which Wanda had been studying with a torch.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ He looked very serious.

  ‘About sixty kilometres from Kars,’ she said.

  ‘But we’re on the wrong road. That’s on the Russian Frontier.’

  ‘Not quite on it. The frontier’s here’ – she pointed to the map – ‘on the river, a long way from the town.’

  ‘How long have you known this?’ I had never seen him so worried.

  ‘Since we had that swim: the current was going the wrong way. I thought you realized it.’

  At first I thought he was going to hit her. Finally, he said in a strangled sort of voice, ‘We must go back immediately.’

  ‘Whatever for? Look, there’s a road along the Turkish side of the river, south to Argadsh, just north of Ararat. It’s a wonderful chance. If we’re stopped all we’ve got to say is that we took the wrong road.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you. Do you realize my position? I’m a member of the Foreign Service but I haven’t got a diplomatic visa for Turkey. We have permission to cross Anatolia by the shortest possible route. In this vehicle we’ve got several cameras, one with a long-focus lens, a telescope, prismatic compasses, an aneroid and several large-scale maps.’

  ‘The maps are all of Afghanistan.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll know the difference at a road block? We’ve even got half a dozen daggers.’

  ‘They weren’t my idea. I always said daggers were crazy.’

  ‘That’s not the point. You saw what the Turks were like in Erzerum. We shall all be arrested. We may even get shot. It’s got all the makings of an incident. And you’re not even British.’

  ‘By marriage,’ said Wanda, ‘but I think you’re making it sound much worse than it really is.’

  We argued with him in the growing darkness, even made fun of him, but it was 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, S.W. 1, and the scent was breast-high.

  It took me some moments to remember where I had encountered this almost mad certainty before, then it came to me – at the memorable interview with the man from the Asian Desk.

  We were ninety kilometres from Horasan. Finally he agreed to continue to the next town, Sarikamis, and return the following day.

  But the next day had brought disaster and tragedy. Towards evening we had arrived at Bayazid. ‘Fortress town on the Persian Frontier; close to Ararat on the great caravan road from Tabriz to Erzerum with the Serail of Ezak Pasha on a rock.’ The ancient guide to Turkey
had made it sound romantic, but the splendours of the caravan road had departed and several earthquakes and countless massacres had made of Bayazid a sad, shanty town without a skyline, full of soldiers clumping down the single street in great boots, and debased-looking civilians in tattered western suits and cloth caps.

  Determined to sleep in Persia we set off at breakneck speed towards the east. Night was coming on. The road was deserted; it ran through an arid plain; to the right were low mountains with, close under them, the black tents of the nomad people. All day, in the upland country about Ararat, we had seen bands of them on the march, driving their bullocks loaded with tent poles and big tribal cooking pots; vicious-looking donkeys with pack saddles, flocks of goats and sheep; the men and women on foot, the women in full red skirts with a sort of black surcoat and black balaclavas, the younger ones in pill-box hats and plaits, the boys wearing lambskin caps, the smallest children sitting, on white cushions, astride lean little horses; all moving westward along the line of the telegraph poles, each family enveloped in its own cloud of dust.

  Less than a mile from the Customs House on the Turkish side, travelling in the last of the light, something dark loomed up on the road in front. Wanda shouted but Hugh was already braking hard. There was going to be an accident and it was going to take a long time to happen. I wondered whether he would swerve off the road and whether we should turn over when he did. He shouted to us to hold on, the wheels locked and we went into a long tearing skid with the horn blaring and all our luggage falling on us, pressing us forward on to the windscreen, everything happening at once as we waited for the smash but instead coming to a standstill only a few feet from whatever it was in the road.

  There was a moment of silence broken only by awful groans. We were fearful of what we should see but the reality was worse than anything we imagined. Lying in the road, face downwards, a shapeless black bundle covered with dust, was one of the nomads. He was an old man of about seventy, blackened by the sun, with a cropped grizzled head. Something had run him down from behind and his injuries were terrible; his nose was almost completely torn off and swelling up through a tear in the back of his shirt was a great liquid bulge; but he was still conscious and breathing like a steam engine.