12 DECEMBER 1998, Page 45

Arriving from nowhere, leaving for somewhere

Tahir Shah

AMONG THE MOUNTAINS by Wilfred Thesiger HarperCollins, £24.99, pp. 250 In his classic travel book A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby tells of how he and his companion, Hugh Carless, were regrouping after their miserable, failed attempt to climb one of Nuristan's highest peaks, with virtually no preparation or equipment. Just as morale had hit rock bot- tom and they were at each other's throats, Wilfred Thesiger arrived as if from nowhere. Compared to the enfeebled Newby and Carless, with their blow-up mattress and sordid stomach complaints, the indefatigable explorer was as hard as nails. His team was orderly and well fed, his equipment in immaculate condition. Thesiger amazed his fellow Englishmen with tales of his journey, not to mention the gruesome operations (such as removing fingers, taking out eyes) to which he had been treating the locals. Thesiger's own account of the expedition to Nuristan has never been published until now. Among the Mountains records seven journeys made by him between 1950 and 1963 in Iraqi Kur- distan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. As with his last book, The Danakil Diaries, Among the Mountains is based on his journals.

Wilfred Thesiger is best known for the many years he spent with the Bedu of Saudi Arabia and the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. In their own way as extreme as the marshes or the Empty Quarter, the Himalayas seem an obvious place to find him. As he notes, the people with whom he came into con- tact, whether they be Pathans, Mongols, Kurds or Nuristanis, were followers of Islam which, 'gave me an understanding of their behaviour'.

First attracted to the Himalayas after reading Eric Shipton's Upon that Mountain, Thesiger saw Shipton as an explorer with a purpose, rather than a mountaineer. Unable to understand the 'because it was there' attitude, he says, 'I sense no personal challenge in an unclimbed mountain face.' Like Shipton, Thesiger climbed a mountain to find out what lay beyond it. He admits that he has always tried the easiest route up a mountain, and has only once climbed on a rope — in Morocco's High Atlas. Although adequate, his equipment has never been more than basic, his preference being for a bivvy tent, a couple of blankets, some medicines, an ice-axe, some solid fuel, and a copy of Kim or Lord Jim.

As with Thesiger's other books, Among the Mountains is far more about the people in whose lands he was travelling than about the landscape itself. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of detail is astonishing. Almost like a grand Victorian travelogue in its preci- sion, the book provides a wealth of geo- graphical information as well as a wide range of cultural observation. Its basis in the expedition journals — even though written up to 45 years ago — gives it a remarkable freshness: matter-of-fact Thesiger at his best.

Thesiger says that he had always dreamed of walking among the Himalayas. Over a lunch at the Travellers' Club, Ship- ton had suggested that he journey to the 25,550-foot Rakaposhi mountain in Hunza, northern Pakistan. Thesiger, who was living in the Iraqi marshes at the time, flew from Basra to Karachi in July 1952 to escape the Arabian summer heat. Unable to get permission to travel to Hunza, he explored the Swat and Chitral valleys and observed the 'black kafirs', whose kinsmen, across the border in Afghanistan, were converted to Islam a century ago by Adber Rahman. Unlike their Afghan cousins, the Pakistani kafirs, Thesiger noted, still brewed wine from grapes, erected giant wooden statues to their dead and continued to worship their pagan deities.

The following year, Thesiger again took refuge from the Iraqi summer in the Himalayas. This time he did set eyes on Shipton's beloved Rakaposhi Ca great white pyramid of ice'), and explored the mighty Karakoram region, once the fron- tier of the 'Great Game'. The next summer he left Iraq for a third time, destined for the Himalayas:

After six months in the Iraqi marshes, living in semi-submerged houses and going about in a canoe, I was again anxious to stretch my legs on the mountain tops.

Armed with an 1882 Gazetteer of Afghanistan, he spent six weeks among the Hazaras, who are of Mongol descent, in central Afghanistan.

Ever since meeting the kafirs of Chitral in 1952, he had been eager to explore the Afghan side of the border known as Nuris- tan (formerly called Kafiristan — the 'Land of Unbelievers'). Even in the 1950s, few westerners had gained access to the area, which was the setting for Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Having finally secured the necessary permission, Thesiger set off north-east towards the Chamar pass. It was just beyond the village of Karwash Khan that he came across Newby and Carless, who had been trying to climb Mount Samir. He records their state: `Exhausted, desiccated, wind-chapped, lame, with bandaged hands, they looked in thoroughly bad shape.'

Nine years were to pass before Thesiger returned to Nuristan. Since his previous visit to the region, he had travelled in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, as well as with Iran's Bakhtiari nomads on their annual migration. On his second Nuristani journey, he ventured to Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan. One of the high- lights of the expedition was seeing the lapis lazuli mines at Sar-i-Sand, the remote Cen- tral Asian valley from which all ancient Egypt's lapis lazuli derived.

Few of the lands which Thesiger has explored have remained unchanged. Just as Iraq's marshes have been drained and the Saudi Arabia of the 1950s has all but disappeared, the mountainous regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq have undergone profound change. Among the Mountains is a time-capsule of powerful description and observation, illustrated with a number of photographs taken with Thesiger's trusty 1935 Leica II. We are fortunate that these journeys have been chronicled for posterity at long last.

Tahir Shah is the author of Sorcerer's Apprentice (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20).