Eric Newby – A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush/HarperPress (2010)

Eric Newby was born in 1919. In 1940 he joined the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he was an outstanding cadet and then joined the Special Boat Section. He was taken prisoner of war after raiding a German airfield in Sicily. He later escaped but was recaptured, a story which is the basis for his book, ‘Love and War in the Apennines’.

In 1956 Eric and Hugh Carless, an experienced climber and a member of the embassy staff in Tehran set out to climb Mir Samir, a mountain of about 20,000 feet in the Hindu Kush. Eric himself had relatively little climbing experience. The attempt failed but the resulting book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, has become one of the classics of adventure literature: there would seem to be two main reasons.

First, it a finely crafted book, eminently readable, tuned to the spirit of the age and full of wit and humour. Through the self-deprecating language which he adopts, he manages to turn their failure to reach the summit of Mir Samir into something of a triumph because his story is about the way the two of them travelled rather than what they achieved. The second reason must lie in the train of catastrophic events, once barely imaginable, which have projected Afghanistan on to the world stage during the last four decades, which have all helped maintain the rise in status of an already merit-worthy book. That Evelyn Waugh agreed to write his perceptive foreword is a recommendation in itself.

This extract is a description of a scene when they are starting their ascent of Mir Samir:

The lake water came from the glacier of which Hugh had spoken; we were in fact in the ‘dead ground’ that I had been trying hard to visualise during our telescope reconnaissance. From the rock wall that was our immediate destination, the glacier rolled down towards us from the east (to be accurate E.N.E.) like a tidal wave, stopping short a mile from where we were in a confusion of moraine rocks thrown up by its own movements, like gigantic shingle thrown up by the sea.

Eric Newby died in 2006.