5. Eric Newby, A Traveller’s Life (London, Collins, 1992).
6. Tony Davies, When the Moon Rises (London, Leo Cooper, 1973). Davies made a remarkable attempt at escape, walking seven hundred kilometres down the crest of the Apennines for three months until he was shot in the foot and recaptured on the Sangro river. After the war he qualified in medicine and practised as a much-admired family doctor in the Tillingbourne valley in Surrey.
7. In 2008 Merlin still maintain medical staff in Badakhshan and Takhar, where they specialize in helping the Afghan authorities to reduce maternal mortality.
8. The film would have been produced by Peter Firstbrook and directed by Amanda Theunissen.
9. In 2007, The Royal Society for Asian Affairs invited me to give a lecture on ‘Eric Newby, The Hindu Kush and The Ganges’ which was later published in Asian Affairs, vol. XXXVIII, no. III, November 2007.
10. In 1959, a group of German climbers from Nuremberg claimed the honour of having been the first to scale Mir Samir. They had evidently bivouacked nearer the summit than we had dared to do, and so had been able to get up and down the following day.
11. Sandy Gall was the leading British journalist to report, by television films and also by his books, on the resistance led by Masud. In addition, in 1983 he founded Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal as a charity to provide orthopaedic equipment and workshops for disabled Afghans.
12. The Icon film Travellers’ Century: Eric Newby (TX 2008 BBC4) was directed by Harry Marshall and filmed by Benedict Allen.
13. Hallmark Hall of Fame television film Love and War 2001.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the Afghan Government for their kindness and co-operation in allowing me to travel in Nuristan, and to Vogue for permission to reproduce Meeting an Explorer which first appeared in it and which is now incorporated in Chapter 20.
The map to illustrate the journey is based on the maps of the Survey of India and a traverse made by Wilfred Thesiger, D.S.O., in 1956, and our own researches.
About the Author
ERIC NEWBY was born in London in 1919 and was educated at St Paul’s School. In 1938, he joined the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu as an apprentice and sailed in the last Grain Race from Australia to Europe, by way of Cape Horn. During World War II, he served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section. In 1942, he was captured and remained a prisoner-of-war until 1945. He subsequently married the girl who helped him escape, and for the next fifty years, his wife Wanda was at his side on many adventures. After the war, his world expanded still further – into the fashion business and book publishing. Whatever else he was doing, Newby always travelled on a grand scale, either under his own steam or as the Travel Editor for the Observer. He was made a CBE in 1994 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2001. Eric Newby died in 2006.
Praise
From the reviews of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush:
‘The most successful travel writer of his generation. It’s impossible to read this book without laughing aloud’
Observer
‘One of the most enjoyable reads of the last century’
Herald Tribune
‘Endlessly entertaining and self-deprecating’
Daily Mail
‘Full of serendipity and surprise’
Economist
‘A total success’
New Yorker
WILLIAM TREVOR, Guardian
‘I still think the last few sentences of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush the funniest ending to any book I have read’
GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE, The Times
‘The book that made [Newby’s] reputation … typically ironic in its understatement’
Observer
‘Newby is easily the best of the bunch’
Sunday Times
Also by the Author
The Last Grain Race
Something Wholesale
Slowly Down the Ganges
Grain Race: Pictures of Life Before the Mast in a Windjammer
Love and War in the Apennines
The Mitchell Beazley World Atlas of Exploration
Great Ascents: A Narrative History of Mountaineering
The Big Red Train Ride
A Traveller’s Life
On the Shores of the Mediterranean
A Book of Travellers’ Tales (ed.)
Round Ireland in Low Gear
What the Traveller Saw
A Small Place in Italy
A Merry Dance Around the World: The Best of Eric Newby
Learning the Ropes: An Apprentice in the
Last of the Windjammers
Copyright
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith
London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This HarperPress edition published 2010
First published by Secker & Warburg 1958
First published in paperback by Arrow 1961
Published by Picador in 1974 in association with William Collins Sons
Fiftieth anniversary edition published by Picador 2008
Copyright © Eric Newby 1958
Preface copyright © Evelyn Waugh 1959
Epilogue copyright © Hugh Carless 2008
Eric Newby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007508143
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