A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Because we were tired, having driven all night, we had forgotten to discuss terms for this pilotage. Now, safe on the other bank, too late we began to haggle.

‘This is a monstrous charge for wading a river.’ It was necessary to scream to make oneself heard above the sound of the tractor.

‘It is fortunate that we did not make use of the tractor,’ said the man in the ragged turban. ‘It is rare for a motor to cross by its own power. With the tractor you would have had greater cause for lamentation.’

‘That being so by now you must be men of wealth.’

Back came the unanswerable answer.

‘But if we were not poor, Āghā, why should we be sitting on the shores of the Farah-Rud waiting for travellers such as you?’

The walls of the hotel at Farah were whitewashed and already at six o’clock dazzling in the sun. Breakfast was set in the garden: it was a silly idea of our own: runny eggs and flies and dust and hot sun all mixed inextricably together in an inedible mass.

We passed the day lying on charpoys in a darkened room. Hugh was out completely, like a submarine charging its batteries, naked but for his Pathan trousers. Except for a brief interval for lunch, mildly curried chicken and good bread, he slept ten hours.

I could not sleep. I tried to read but it was too hot. Outside beyond the shutters the world was dead, sterilized by sun. At a little distance, shimmering in the heat, were the turreted walls of old Farah. I longed to visit it but the prospect of crossing the sizzling intervening no-man’s-land alone was too much. This was the city that Genghis Khan had captured and vainly attempted to knock down in the thirteenth century, that was re-occupied in the eighteenth and finally abandoned voluntarily in the nineteenth, so miserable had life within its walls become.

The sun expired in a haze of dust and the long, terrible day was over. In the early evening we set off. To the left were the jagged peaks of the Siah Band range; there were no trees and no sign of water, but by the roadside wild melons were growing, and we halted to try them but they were without taste. As we grew sticky eating bought melons from Farah, using the bonnet of the vehicle as a table, two nomad men passed with a camel, followed at a distance of a quarter of a mile by a youngish woman who lurched along in an extremity of fatigue. Neither of the men paid the slightest attention to her but they saluted us cheerfully as they went past.