Free A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

it up in their tails for the winter.’
    ‘I’ve never smelt a sheep like this, dead or alive.’
    ‘It’s excellent for cooking,’ Hugh said. Nevertheless, he ordered boiled eggs.
    I had ‘ mast ’ . Normally an innocuous dish of curdled milk fit for the most squeamish stomach, it arrived stiff as old putty, the same colour and pungent.
    While I was being noisily ill in the street, a solitary man came to gaze. ‘ Shekam dard ,’ I said, pointing to my stomach, thinking to enlist his sympathy, and returned to the work in hand. When next I looked at him he had taken off his trousers and was mouthing at me. With my new display of interest, he started to strip himself completely until a relative led him away struggling.
    That night we huddled in our sleeping-bags at the bottom of a dried-out watercourse. It seemed to offer some protection from the wind, which howled about us, but in the morning we woke to find ourselves buried under twin mounds of sand like dead prospectors. But for the time being I was cured: sixteen sulphaguanadine tablets in sixteen hours had done it.
    Full of sand we drove to the frontier town, Taiabad. It was only eight o’clock but the main street was already an oven. The military commander, a charming colonel, offered us sherbet in his office. It was delicious and tasted of honey. Hugh discussed the scandals of the opium smuggling with him. ‘It is a disgraceful habit,’ the Colonel said. ‘Here, of course, it is most rigorously repressed but it is difficult to control the traffic at more remote places.’ (In the Customs House the clerks were already at this hour enveloped in clouds of smoke.) ‘You are going to Kabul. Which route are you proposing to take?’
    We asked him which he thought the best.
    ‘The northern is very long; the centre, through the Hazara country, is very difficult; the way by Kandahar is very hot. We are still awaiting the young American, Winant. He set off to come here by the northern route in May.’
    ‘But today’s the second of July.’
    ‘There was a Swedish nurse with him. Also he was very religious. It was a great mistake – a dangerous combination. Now we shall never see them again. In some respects it is a disagreeable country. Unless you are bound to go there, I counsel you to remain in Iran. I shall be delighted to put you up here for as long as you wish. It is very lonely for me here.’
    We told him our plans.
    ‘You are not armed? You are quite right. It is inadvisable; so many travellers are, especially Europeans. It only excites the cupidity of the inhabitants. I should go by Kandahar. Your visasare for Kandahar and that is the only route they will permit anyway. That is if anyone at the customs post can read,’ he added mischievously.
    Reluctantly we took leave of this agreeable man and set off down the road through a flat wilderness, until we came to a road block formed by a solitary tree-trunk. In the midst of this nothingness, pitched some distance from the road, was a sad little tent shuddering in the wind. After we had sounded the horn for some minutes a sergeant appeared and with infinite slowness drew back the tree-trunk to let us pass and without speaking returned to the flapping tent. Whatever indiscretion the Colonel may have been guilty of to land himself in such a place as Taiabad paled into utter insignificance when one considered the nameless crimes that this sergeant must have been expiating in his solitary tent.
    After eight miles in a no-man’s-land of ruined mud forts and nothing else we came to a collection of buildings so deserted-looking that we thought they must be some advanced post evacuated for lack of amenity. This time the tree-trunk was white-washed. As Hugh got down to remove it, angry cries came from the largest and most dilapidated building and a file of soldiers in hairy uniforms that seemed to have been made from old blankets poured out of it and hemmed us in. As we marched across the open space towards the