A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Eric Newby
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had acquired Urdu rapidly sixteen years before. It had vanished as quickly as it came. Soon I dried up completely and was left mouthing affirmatives. ‘Han, han.’
‘For God’s sake don’t keep on saying, “Han, han”. They’ll think you’re crazy.’
‘I’ve said everything I can remember. What do you want me to say. That we’re not coming back, ever?’1
With all the various delights of Meshed to sample it was late when we set off. Driving in clouds of dust and darkness beyond the outer suburbs the self-starter began to smoke. Grovelling under the vehicle among the ants and young scorpions, fearful of losing our feet when the great American lorries roared past, we attained the feeling of comradeship that only comes in moments of adversity.
The starter motor was held in place by two inaccessible screws that must have been tightened by a giant. It was a masterpiece of British engineering. With the ants marching and counter-marching over me, I held a guttering candle while Hugh groped with the tinny spanner that was part of the manufacturers’ ‘tool-kit’.
‘What does the book say?’
It was difficult to read it with my nose jammed into the earth.
‘The starter is pre-packed with grease and requires no maintenance during the life of the vehicle.’
‘That’s the part about lubrication but how do you GET IT OFF?’
It was like trying to read a first folio in a crowded train. I knocked over the candle and for a time we were in complete darkness.
‘It says: “Loosen the retaining screws and slide it.”’
‘There must be a place in hell for the man who wrote that.’
‘Perhaps you have to take the engine out first.’
Late at night we returned unsuccessful to the city and in the Shāri Tehran, the Warren Street of Meshed, devoted to the motor business, hammered on the wooden doors of what until recently had been a caravanserai, until the night watchman came with stave and lantern and admitted us.
In the great court, surrounded by broken-down droshkies and the skeletons of German motor-buses, we spread our sleeping-bags on the oily ground beside our vehicle. For the first time since leaving Istanbul we had achieved Hugh’s ambition to sleep ‘under the stars’.
Early the next morning the work was put in hand at a workshop which backed on to the courtyard. It was the sort of place where engines are dismembered and never put together again. The walls of the shop were covered with the trophies of failure, which, together with the vast, inanimate skeletons outside, gave me the same curious feelings of fascination and horror that I still experience in that part of the Natural History Museum devoted to prehistoric monsters.
The proprietor Abdul, a broken-toothed demon of a man, conceived a violent passion for Hugh. We sat with him drinking coffee inside one of the skeletons while his assistant, a midget ten-year-old, set to work on the starter with a spanner as big as himself, shaming us by the ease with which he removed it.
‘Arrrh, CAHARLESS, soul of your father. You have ill-used your motor-car.’ He hit Hugh a violent blow of affection in the small of the back, just as he was drinking his coffee.
‘Urggh!’
‘What do you say, O CAHARLESS?’
Hugh was mopping thick black coffee from his last pair of clean trousers.
‘I say nothing.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘How should I know.’
‘You are angry with me. Let us go to my workshop and I shall make you happy.’
He led us into the shop. There he left us. In a few minutes he returned with a small blind boy, good-looking but with an air of corruption. Abdul threw down his spanner with a clang and began to fondle him.
‘CAHARLESS!’ he roared, beckoning Hugh.
‘NO!’
Presently Abdul pressed the boy into a cupboard and shut the door. There followed a succession of nasty stifled noises that drove us out of the shop.
Later, when we returned, Hugh was given a tremendous welcome.
‘CAHARLESS, I thought you were departed for ever. You have come back!’
‘You still have my motor-car.’
To me he was less demonstrative but also less polite, snatching my pipe from my mouth and clenching it between his awful broken teeth in parody of an Englishman.
‘CAHARLESS, when you take me to Englestan I shall smoke the pipe.’
All through the hot afternoon he worked like a demon with his midget assistant, every few minutes beseeching Hugh to take him to England. After two hours the repairs were finished. Now he wanted to show us how he had driven to Tehran in fourteen hours, a journey that had taken us two days and most of one night.
In breathless heat he whirled us through the streets, tyres screeching at the corners. We were anxious to pay the bill and be off. Never had we met anyone more horrible than Abdul, more energetic and more likely to succeed.
‘How much?’
‘CAHARLESS, my heart, CAHARLESS, my soul, you will transport me to Englestan?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘We shall drive together?’
What a pair they would make on the Kingston By-Pass.
‘Yes, of course, Bastard’ (in English). ‘How much?’
The machine almost knocked down a heavily swathed old lady descending from a droshky and screamed to a halt outside a café filled with evil-looking men, all of whom seemed to be smitten with double smallpox.
‘CAHARLESS, I am your slave. I will drive you to Tehran.’
‘Praise be to God for your kindness (and I hope you drop dead). THE BILL.’
‘CAHARLESS, soul of your father, I shall bring you water. Ho, there, Mohammed Gholi. Oh, bring water for CAHARLESS, my soul, my love. He is thirsty.’
He screamed at the robbers in the shop, who came stumbling out with a great chatti which they slopped over Carless.
‘Thank you, that is sufficient.’
‘CAHARLESS, I love you as my son.’
‘This bill is enormous.’
It was enormous but probably correct.
A little beyond Meshed we stopped at a police post in a miserable hamlet to ask the way to the Afghan Frontier and Herat. I was already afflicted with the gastric disorders that were to hang like a cloud over our venture, a pale ghost of the man who had climbed the Spiral Stairs on Dinas Cromlech less than a month before. Hugh seemed impervious to bacilli and, as I sat in the vehicle waiting for him to emerge from the police station, I munched sulphaguanadine tablets gloomily and thought of the infected ice-cream he had insisted on buying at Kazvin on the road from Tabriz to Tehran.
‘We must accustom our stomachs to this sort of thing,’ he had said and had shared it with Wanda, who had no need to accustom herself to anything as she was returning to Italy.
The germs had been so virulent that she had been struck down almost at once; only after three days in bed at the Embassy with a high temperature had she been able to totter to the plane on the unwilling arm of a Queen’s Messenger. I had rejected the ice-cream. Hugh had eaten it and survived. It was unjust; I hated him; now I wondered whether my wife was dead, and who would look after my children.
I had succumbed much later. In the fertile plain between Neishapur and Meshed we had stopped