2022/23: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush -- Eric Newby

2022/23: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush -- Eric Newby

The chickens were produced. They were very old; in the half-light they looked like pterodactyls.
‘Are they expensive?’
‘The Power of Britain never grows less,’ said the headman, lying superbly.
‘That means they are very expensive,’ said the interpreter, rousing himself. [p. 268]

I'd encountered Newby's writing long ago, in The Last Grain Race, an account of working on a commercial sailing ship in the late 1930s. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a more traditional model of mid-20th century British travel writing. Newby and his friend Hugh Carless set out, secure in their Britishness, to climb a mountain in what is now Afghanistan. ( Read more... )