A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Early on the following morning he was battering on our door. He had just arrived by air and was aggressively fit and clean. Between his teeth was a Dunhill pipe in which some luxurious mixture was burning; under his arm was a clip board full of maps and lists. His clothes had just the right mixture of the elegant and the dashing. He was the epitome of a young explorer. We knew what he would say. It was an expression that we were to hear with ever-increasing revulsion in the weeks to come.

‘We must leave at once.’

‘We can’t, the wagon’s got to be serviced.’

‘I’ve already arranged that. It’ll be ready at noon.’

Like survivors of an artillery bombardment we were still shaking from the spine-shattering road we had taken through Bulgaria. What the pre-war guide had described as ‘another route’.

‘It’s been rather a long drive.’ We enumerated the hardships we had undergone, how we had been stripped by customs officials on the Yugoslav frontier, the hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs in the Balkans, the floods, landslips, mosquitoes, all the tedious mishaps of our journey; but lying in our splendid bed we were not objects for obvious sympathy.

‘I shall drive. You two can rest.’

‘You don’t seem to realize,’ I said, ‘there’s no rest in that machine, there’s so much stuff in it. After a bit we were fighting one another to drive. Besides, damn it, we want to see Istanbul.’

‘You can always see Istanbul some other time. It’s been here for two thousand years.’

‘You mean you can always see it another time.’

He looked at his watch reluctantly.

‘How long do you want?’

Only Wanda had the courage to answer. ‘Three days,’ she said.

We grew fond of the Pera Palace; the beds had big brass knobs on and were really comfortable. Our room seemed the setting for some ludicrous comedy that was just about to begin. Probably it had already been played many times. It was easy to imagine some bearded minister of Abdul Hamid pursuing a fat girl in black stockings and garters round it and hurting himself on the sharp bits of furniture. In the bathroom the bath had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe without recourse to the taps. We watched this process enthralled.

‘I think it’s when the current’s running strongly in the Bosphorus.’

‘It can’t be that. It’s warm.’

‘Why don’t you taste it?’

‘I can’t remember whether the Bosphorus is salt or not. Besides it’s a very curious colour sometimes.’

It was Wanda who discovered the truth. I found her with her ear jammed hard against the wall of the bathroom.

‘It’s the man next door. He’s just had a bath. Now he’s pulled out the plug. Here it comes.’

For the second time that day the bath began to fill silently.

By contrast the staff were mostly very old and very sad and, apart from our friend in the next bathroom, we never saw anyone. There was a restaurant where we ate interminable meals in an atmosphere of really dead silence. It was the hotel of our dreams.

Three days later we left Istanbul. The night porter at the Pera Palace had been told to call us at a quarter to four; knowing that he wouldn’t, I willed myself to wake at half past three. I did so but immediately fell into a profound slumber until Hugh arrived an hour later from his modern Oteli up the hill, having bathed, shaved, breakfasted and collected the vehicle. It was not an auspicious beginning to our venture. He told us so.

There was a long wait for the ferry to take us to Scutari and when it did finally arrive embarkation proceeded slowly. Consumed by an urgent necessity, I asked the ferry master who bowed me into his own splendidly appointed quarters, where I fell into a delightful trance, emerging after what seemed only a moment to see the ferry boat disappearing towards the Asian shore with the motor-car and my ticket. At the barrier there was a great press of people and one of three fine-looking porters stole my wallet. It was the ferry master himself who escorted me on to the next boat, ‘pour tirer d’embarras notre client distingué’ as he ironically put it. For the second time in my life I left Europe penniless.

CHAPTER FIVE The Dying Nomad (#ulink_be514360-aa8f-5762-bd5e-3bef2d481e68)

On the road from Istanbul we were detained by a series of misadventures in Armenia. At Horasan, a small one-street town on the Aras river, instead of turning right for Agri and the Persian frontier, Hugh roared straight on. There was a long climb, followed by a descent on hairpin bends into a canyon of red, silver and green cliffs, with a castle perched on the top, down to a village where the air was cool under the trees and women were treading something underfoot in a river, and a level stretch under an overhanging cliff where gangs working on a narrow gauge railway were bringing down avalanches of stones. On the right was the same fast running river.

We were tired and indescribably dirty. In the last of the sunlight we crossed a green meadow and bathed in a deep pool. It was very cold.

‘What river do you think this is?’ Bathed and shaved we sat in the meadow putting on clean socks. Behind a rock, further downstream Wanda was washing her hair.

‘It’s the Aras.’

‘But the Aras flows west to east; this one’s going in the opposite direction.’

‘How very peculiar. What do you make of it?’

‘It can’t be the Aras.’

With night coming down we drove on beside the railway, over a wooden bridge that thundered and shuddered under our weight, through a half-ruined village built of great stone blocks where two men were battering one another to death and the women, black-skirted and wearing white head-scarves, minded their own business, up and up through a ravine with the railway always on our left, into pine forests where the light was blue and autumnal – partisan, Hemingway country, brooding and silent – past a sealed-up looking house, with Hugh’s dreadful radio blaring all the time louder and louder until suddenly we realized that what we were listening to was Russian, crystal clear and getting stronger every minute.

Hugh stopped the car and switched on the light and we huddled over the map, which Wanda had been studying with a torch.

‘Do you know where we are?’ He looked very serious.

‘About sixty kilometres from Kars,’ she said.

‘But we’re on the wrong road. That’s on the Russian Frontier.’

‘Not quite on it. The frontier’s here’ – she pointed to the map – ‘on the river, a long way from the town.’

‘How long have you known this?’ I had never seen him so worried.

‘Since we had that swim: the current was going the wrong way. I thought you realized it.’

At first I thought he was going to hit her. Finally, he said in a strangled sort of voice, ‘We must go back immediately.’

‘Whatever for? Look, there’s a road along the Turkish side of the river, south to Argadsh, just north of Ararat. It’s a wonderful chance. If we’re stopped all we’ve got to say is that we took the wrong road.’

‘It’s all very well for you. Do you realize my position? I’m a member of the Foreign Service but I haven’t got a diplomatic visa for Turkey. We have permission to cross Anatolia by the shortest possible route. In this vehicle we’ve got several cameras, one with a long-focus lens, a telescope, prismatic compasses, an aneroid and several large-scale maps.’

‘The maps are all of Afghanistan.’

‘Do you think they’ll know the difference at a road block? We’ve even got half a dozen daggers.’

‘They weren’t my idea. I always said daggers were crazy.’

‘That’s not the point. You saw what the Turks were like in Erzerum. We shall all be arrested. We may even get shot. It’s got all the makings of an incident. And you’re not even British.’

‘By marriage,’ said Wanda, ‘but I think you’re making it sound much worse than it really is.’

We argued with him in the growing darkness, even made fun of him, but it was no use, he was beyond the reach of humour. On his face was a look that I had never seen. He spoke with an air of absolute certainty, like a man under the influence of drugs. Like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows picking up the scent of his old home, Hugh was in direct contact with the Foreign Office, S.W. 1, and the scent was breast-high.

It took me some moments to remember where I had encountered this almost mad certainty before, then it came to me – at the memorable interview with the man from the Asian Desk.