A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A couple of years ago I saw a remarkable documentary about a remarkable man, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who during the Second World War, led and daring raid on the German forces in occupied Crete, capturing the General stationed on the island and taking him into Allied custody. Then over ninety, he could still tell a good story about his travels, and I made a note to read his books.

To my shame it has taken a while to get around to this, but I am now enjoying his account of a walk from London to Constantinople, a tale so rich in detail that it sprawls over two volumes. A Time of Gifts is the first, chronicling how in the winter of 1933, at the age of eighteen, he set off from Britain with little more than a rucksack, a walking stick and a sturdy pair of boots.

The trek gets off to a good start: in Hook of Holland he stops for a coffee after getting off the boat. As he’s leaving, the landlord wants to know where he’s headed:

I put on my greatcoat, slung the rucksack, grasped my stick and headed for the door. The landlord asked where I was going: I said: “Constantinople”. His brows went up and he signalled for me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them; he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey.

After following the Rhine upstream through the Netherlands and Germany, stopping in beer cellars and wine houses – “It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much.” – he reaches Austria. In less than five years time the country would be annexed in the 1938 Anchluss, succumbing to the horrors of Nazism that he had already seen in his walk through Germany. In the early months of 1934, the old order of the Habsburgs lives on in the castles that line the Danube, and armed with letters of introduction, Fermor is invited to stay with the lower nobility from an Empire that disintegrated a mere fifteen years before.

They certainly have a lot to talk about, and Fermor soaks up stories about the old kaiserlich und königlich:

As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks – or so I thought – and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!”, he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono – !” I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar – the last of a bottle of liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age.

As much as it is a cliché to say that Fermor writes exquisitely about a world that’s now gone forever, it happens to be true in this case. He also links us to the world of Jaroslav Hašek and Joseph Roth, and for that I will always be grateful.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

Further afield this week to one of the best loved pieces of travel writing from the last century, Eric Newby’s account of his desperately unprepared trek through the wildest corner of Afghanistan and an almost suicidal attempt on the peak of Mir Samir.

After travelling overland to Kabul from the UK (an adventure in itself) Newby and his travelling companion Hugh Carless arrive in the Afghan capital feeling badly acclimatised and out of shape. In an effort to get a head for the mountains they decide to climb Legation Hill outside the city the next morning.

Above the compound there is a small hill, perhaps a thousand feet high, up which young secretaries pelt in gym shoes after a heavy night. This is Legation Hill. In the early morning we set out to scale it, laden with heavy boots and all the impedimenta of our assumed trade... It took us twenty-five minutes to reach the top. “Archie used to do it in ten,” said Hugh, as panting and feeling sick, we sprawled on the summit, pretending to admire the extensive view of the suburbs of Kabul spread out below us. “He must be a superman.” “Not at all. He had to leave the Foreign Service because he drank too much.”

Hiring three Tajik guides, they set off for the Hindu Kush, ostensibly to climb Mir Samir at the top of the Panjshir Valley. However, after this ends in failure below the summit, they press on into the forbidding valleys of Nuristan, the wildest and remotest part of Afghanistan.

Only converted to Islam in the last years of the 19th Century, Nuristan, formerly Kafiristan, enjoyed a healthy viticulture. Unfortunately, they also robbed and murdered travellers from other parts of the country and were slowly being tooled up by the Russians in a bloody side chapter of the Great Game.

In 1895 the happy existence of the Kafirs as robbers, murderers of Muslims, drinkers of prodigious quantities of wine, keepers of slaves, worshippers of Imra the Creator, Moni the Prophet, Gish the War God and the whole Kafir pantheon with its sixteen principal deities, came to an end...

By the time Newby and his team have arrived in the valleys, the area is dry, but the older men recall the times before Abdur Rahman set out on jehad from Kabul to crush the Kafirs:

“We used to make wine and hunt bear. There was much killing in those days and I was a great swimmer but I do not remember that time with much pleasure. No there is no longer any wine made,” he said rather wistfully. The coming of Islam to Kafiristan seemed to have had the same deadly effect as Knox and the Reformation on Scotland.

Newby describes the magnificent scenery in loving detail and along with his self-deprecating sense of humour it is one of the great pleasures of this book. That said, despite the rugged beauty of Nuristan, Newby can’t help but feel that with the re-introduction of wine making the place would have been a paradise.

There’s obviously something about the mountains that gives him a thirst. On his way back, footsore and dehydrated all he can think about is the contents of a glass:

I dreamt of all the cool drinks I had ever had in my life. The ginger beer I had drunk as a child; foaming lager; draught Worthington; Muscadet kept in a stream until I was ready for it; pints of Pimms, buckets of ice...

Despite the hardships, Newby managed to write up his experiences into a classic of travel literature, the story of two men who set off to visit the Ramgul Katirs in Nuristan for no other reason than to satisfy their curiosity.