A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Read Online Free Page A

furniture from the drawing-room to make room for the equipment and stores. Our three-piece suite was standing in the garden under a tarpaulin. The drawing-room looked like the quartermaster’s store of some clandestine force. It was obvious that Hugh was deeply impressed.
    ‘How long have you been living like this?’
    ‘Ever since we can remember. It’s not all here yet. There’s still the food.’
    ‘What food?’ He looked quite alarmed.
    ‘Six cases of Army ration, compo. in fibre boxes. It’s arriving tomorrow.’
    ‘We can always leave it in England. I don’t know about youbut food doesn’t interest me. We can always live off the country.’
    I remembered von Dückelmann, that hardy Austrian forester without an ounce of spare flesh on him, who had lost twelve pounds in a fortnight in Nuristan.
    ‘Whatever else we leave behind it won’t be the food.’
    ‘Well, I suppose we can always give it away.’ He sounded almost shocked, as if for the first time he had detected in me a grave moral defect. It was an historic moment.
    With unconcealed joy my wife watched us load some of the mountaineering equipment into the machine.
    ‘We’d better not take all of it,’ said Hugh. ‘They might wonder why we’ve got so much stuff if we don’t know how to use it.’
    Over the last weeks the same thought had occurred to me constantly.
    ‘What about the tent?’
    The tent had arrived that morning. It had been described to me by the makers as being suitable for what they called ‘the final assault’. With its sewn-in ground-sheet, special flaps so that it could be weighed down with boulders, it convinced me, more than any other single item of equipment, that we were going, as the books have it, ‘high’. It had been specially constructed for the curious climatic conditions we were likely to encounter in the Hindu Kush.
    ‘I shouldn’t take that , if I were you,’ said my wife with sinister emphasis. ‘The children tried to put it up in the garden after lunch. Whoever made it forgot to make holes for the poles.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Quite sure. You know it’s got those poles shaped like a V, that you slip into a sort of pocket in the material. Well, they haven’t made any pockets, so you can’t put it up.’
    ‘It’s lucky you found out. We should have looked pretty silly on Mir Samir.’
    ‘You’re going to look pretty silly at any rate. I shouldn’t besurprised if they’ve done the same thing to your sleeping-bags.’
    ‘Have you telephoned the makers?’
    ‘That’s no use. If you send it back to them, you’ll never see it again. I’ve sent for the little woman who makes my dresses. She’s coming tomorrow morning.’
    We continued to discuss what we should take to Wales.
    ‘I should take your Folboat,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s bound to be a lake near the inn. It will be a good chance of testing it BEFORE YOU PASS THROUGH THE GORGES . The current is tremendously swift.’
    I had never had any intention of being either drowned or ritually mutilated in Mahsud Territory. I told him that I hadn’t got a Folboat.
    ‘I was almost certain I wrote to you about getting a Folboat. It’s a pity. There’s not much time now.’
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘there isn’t.’
    It was nearly midnight when we left London. Our destination was an inn situated in the wilds of Caernarvonshire. Hugh had telephoned the proprietor and explained to him the peculiar state of ignorance in which we found ourselves. It was useless to dissemble: Hugh had told him everything. He was not only an experienced mountaineer, but was also the head of the mountain rescue service. It is to his eternal credit that he agreed to help us rather than tell us, as a more conventional man might have done, that his rooms were all booked.
    We arrived at six o’clock the following morning, having driven all night, but already a spiral of smoke was issuing from a chimney at the back of the premises.
    The first thing that confronted us when