Robert Byron: The Road to Oxiana

This section will cover a wide selection of writers, both fiction and non-fiction, and will include both those who specialise in writing specifically about walking, whilst in other cases it is simply an important part of the narrative. Writers who go on long journeys but do little walking(by rail for example) will not be included but there are many who make long journeys by various means, including walking, and they will be: Robert Byron was one of the these.

In August 1933 Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Bagdad, and Teheran to Oxiana-the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which formed part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. While his arrival at his destination, the legendary tower of Qabus, is a wonder, the journey itself is a captivating record of his adventures and a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travellers. He and his companions travelled however they could –by horse and by car, but they did a lot of walking.

This is one small extract from his journal whilst in Herat, Afghanistan in May 1934:

Walking out to the Musalla(Mausoleum)with this diary under my arm, in search of peace to write it , I recognize each field, each bank, each twinkling ditch-but only as one recognizes a face in strange clothes. Even the minarets have changed; their blue has grown more vivid, as if in answer to the landscape’s challenge. The huge round bases, that rose before out of the bare earth, rise now from lush emerald corn, in whose depths flourishes a bright purple monkshood; or from the shining white and filling grey-green pods of the opium crops; or from those low trees, scattered with gold when I first saw them, and bare as bones when I left, that have now turned into bushy deep-green mulberries. The sun dispenses a temperate heat from a sky of temperate blue. And over all presides that elusive languid scent which first met us at Kariz, borne from its petalled cave on the caressing summer breeze.

The final entry in his journal written in England on 8th July 1934 shows the fatigue and strain of over 11 months of continuous travel over a difficult terrain and in exhausting conditions:

I left Christopher at Marseille. He was going to Berlin to see Frau Wassmuss. England looked drab and ugly from the train, owing to the drought. At Paddington I began to feel dazed, dazed at the prospect of coming to a stop, at the impending collision between eleven months’ momentum and the immobility of a beloved home. The collision happened.; it was 19 days since we left Kabul. Our dogs ran up. And then my mother-to whom, now it is finished, I deliver the whole record; what I have seen she taught me to see and will tell me if I have honoured it.

(He was returning to his mother’s home in Savernake, Wiltshire where he lived).

Robert Byron died in 1941 whilst travelling out to Africa as a member of the army.