In early 1956, Eric Newby was working in the fashion industry, trying to sell a poorly designed dress to sceptical buyers (‘‘it was not only a hideous dress; it was soaking up money like a sponge’). Newby, a decorated veteran of both the Black Watch and the Special Boat Squadron, enjoyed the fashion business, but decided to accept ten years of advice to quit and resigned. He then sent a telegram to his diplomat friend Hugh Carless, ‘CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?’
Until the 1890s, Nuristan, that part of Afghanistan enclosed by the Hindu Kush (‘Hindu Killer’) mountains, was called Kafiristan: ‘The Land of the Unbelievers’. The region was little known to anyone, and had changed little since Kipling used the place for the setting of his short story, ‘The Man Who Would be King’. Carless said yes, and discovering that neither knew how to climb, they went to Wales to practice; luckily the waitresses at their inn were experienced climbers and taught them the rudiments.
The expedition was actually quite dangerous. The mountains of the Hindu Kush are not far off 20,000 feet high, and the locals were possibly even more of a threat. After a harrowing session on the mountains, they headed for Kabul by descending into the Lower Panjshir, where the two amateurs encountered the genuine article, the great explorer Wilfrid Thesiger. Thesiger was 46, and Newby’s description of the man sums him up well: a ‘throwback to the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who. . .apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life among primitive peoples’. In the 1930s Thesiger crossed the Arabian Empty Quarter twice, and was the first European to traverse the hostile Danakil country in Abyssinia. During WWII, he led SAS raids behind German lines in North Africa.
In exploring terms, Thesiger belongs, as Newby said, to an older, imperialist school, a hard world in which shooting lions, crocodiles and bandits was normal, whereas Newby is among the first and certainly one of the finest (and funniest) of the modern, ironic school. Yet Thesiger would have rejected Newby’s use of the term ‘primitive peoples’, for Thesiger, the people he preferred to be with, far from being ‘primitive’, were the best of people, people for whom generosity, simplicity, and courage were everyday virtues. Thesiger told his new companions about the medical treatments he dispensed on his travels, which included surgery such as finger amputations (‘hundreds’), and just a few days previously, an eye removal. An exhausted Newby and Carless began pumping up their airbeds on the ‘iron’ ground. Said Thesiger: ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies’.
What Happened Next
Newby’s account of working as a seaman in 1938 on the last merchant sailing voyage between Britain and Australia, The Last Grain Race, was to be published later in 1956, establishing him immediately as a travel writer of note. Thesiger’s ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies’ is the last line in Newby’s account of the Nuristan adventure, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), which includes Thesiger’s photograph of the two ‘failures’. Thesiger died in 2003, Newby in 2006.