A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Eric Newby

       Preface

      Mr Eric Newby must not be confused with the other English writer of the same surname. I began reading A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush in the belief that it was the work of his namesake, whom I have long relished. I found something equally delightful but quite different.

      Mr Eric Newby, I have since learned, is the author of an exciting sea-log, The Last Grain Race, an account of how at the age of eighteen he signed on as an apprentice of the Finnish barque Moshulu, lived in the fo’c’sle as the only Englishman, worked the ship, rounded both capes under sail in all the vicissitudes of the historic and now extinct passage from Australia to the United Kingdom of the grain-carrying windjammers. His career in the army was heroic and romantic. The bravado and endurance which had briefly made him a sailor were turned to the King’s service. After the war he went into the most improbable of trades, haute couture. It would strain the imagination to picture this stalwart young adventurer selling women’s clothes. We are relieved of the difficulty by his own deliciously funny description, which immediately captivates the reader of the opening chapters of A Short Walk. One can only use the absurdly trite phrase ‘the call of the wild’ to describe the peculiar impetus which carried Mr Newby from Mayfair to the wild mountains of Afghanistan. He was no sailor when he embarked in the Moshulu; he was no mountaineer when he decided to climb the Hindu Kush. A few days scrambling on the rocks in Wales, enchantingly chronicled here, were his sole preparation. It was not mountaineering that attracted