A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (4 page)

On the road from Istanbul we were detained by a series of misadventures in Armenia. At Horasan, a small one-street town on the Aras river, instead of turning right for Agri and the Persian frontier, Hugh roared straight on. There was a long climb, followed by a descent on hairpin bends into a canyon of red, silver and green cliffs, with a castle perched on the top, down to a village where the air was cool under the trees and women were treading something underfoot in a river, and a level stretch under an overhanging cliff where gangs working on a narrow gauge railway were bringing down avalanches of stones. On the right was the same fast running river.

We were tired and indescribably dirty. In the last of the sunlight we crossed a green meadow and bathed in a deep pool. It was very cold.

‘What river do you think this is?’ Bathed and shaved we sat in the meadow putting on clean socks. Behind a rock, further downstream Wanda was washing her hair.

‘It’s the Aras.’

‘But the Aras flows west to east; this one’s going in the opposite direction.’

‘How very peculiar. What do you make of it?’

‘It can’t be the Aras.’

With night coming down we drove on beside the railway, over a wooden bridge that thundered and shuddered under our weight, through a half-ruined village built of great stone blocks where two men were battering one another to death and the women, black-skirted and wearing white head-scarves, minded their own business, up and up through a ravine with the railway always on our left, into pine forests where the light was blue and autumnal – partisan, Hemingway country, brooding and silent – past a sealed-up looking house, with Hugh’s dreadful radio blaring all the time louder and louder until suddenly we realized that what we were listening to was Russian, crystal clear and getting stronger every minute.

Hugh stopped the car and switched on the light and we huddled over the map, which Wanda had been studying with a torch.

‘Do you know where we are?’ He looked very serious.

‘About sixty kilometres from Kars,’ she said.

‘But we’re on the wrong road. That’s on the Russian Frontier.’

‘Not quite on it. The frontier’s here’ – she pointed to the map – ‘on the river, a long way from the town.’

‘How long have you known this?’ I had never seen him so worried.

‘Since we had that swim: the current was going the wrong way. I thought you realized it.’

At first I thought he was going to hit her. Finally, he said in a strangled sort of voice, ‘We must go back immediately.’

‘Whatever for? Look, there’s a road along the Turkish side of the river, south to Argadsh, just north of Ararat. It’s a wonderful chance. If we’re stopped all we’ve got to say is that we took the wrong road.’

‘It’s all very well for you. Do you realize
my
position? I’m a
member of the Foreign Service but I haven’t got a diplomatic visa for Turkey. We have permission to cross Anatolia by the shortest possible route. In this vehicle we’ve got several cameras, one with a long-focus lens, a telescope, prismatic compasses, an aneroid and several large-scale maps.’

‘The maps are all of Afghanistan.’

‘Do you think they’ll know the difference at a road block? We’ve even got half a dozen daggers.’

‘They weren’t
my
idea. I always said daggers were crazy.’

‘That’s not the point. You saw what the Turks were like in Erzerum. We shall all be arrested. We may even get shot. It’s got all the makings of an incident. And you’re not even British.’

‘By marriage,’ said Wanda, ‘but I think you’re making it sound much worse than it really is.’

We argued with him in the growing darkness, even made fun of him, but it was no use, he was beyond the reach of humour. On his face was a look that I had never seen. He spoke with an air of absolute certainty, like a man under the influence of drugs. Like the Mole in
The Wind in the Willows
picking up the scent of his old home, Hugh was in direct contact with the Foreign Office,
S.W.
1, and the scent was breast-high.

It took me some moments to remember where I had encountered this almost mad certainty before, then it came to me – at the memorable interview with the man from the Asian Desk.

We were ninety kilometres from Horasan. Finally he agreed to continue to the next town, Sarikamis, and return the following day.

But the next day had brought disaster and tragedy. Towards evening we had arrived at Bayazid. ‘Fortress town on the Persian Frontier; close to Ararat on the great caravan road from Tabriz to Erzerum with the Serail of Ezak Pasha on a rock.’ The ancient guide to Turkey had made it sound romantic, but the splendours
of the caravan road had departed and several earthquakes and countless massacres had made of Bayazid a sad, shanty town without a skyline, full of soldiers clumping down the single street in great boots, and debased-looking civilians in tattered western suits and cloth caps.

Determined to sleep in Persia we set off at breakneck speed towards the east. Night was coming on. The road was deserted; it ran through an arid plain; to the right were low mountains with, close under them, the black tents of the nomad people. All day, in the upland country about Ararat, we had seen bands of them on the march, driving their bullocks loaded with tent poles and big tribal cooking pots; vicious-looking donkeys with pack saddles, flocks of goats and sheep; the men and women on foot, the women in full red skirts with a sort of black surcoat and black balaclavas, the younger ones in pill-box hats and plaits, the boys wearing lambskin caps, the smallest children sitting, on white cushions, astride lean little horses; all moving westward along the line of the telegraph poles, each family enveloped in its own cloud of dust.

Less than a mile from the Customs House on the Turkish side, travelling in the last of the light, something dark loomed up on the road in front. Wanda shouted but Hugh was already braking hard. There was going to be an accident and it was going to take a long time to happen. I wondered whether he would swerve off the road and whether we should turn over when he did. He shouted to us to hold on, the wheels locked and we went into a long tearing skid with the horn blaring and all our luggage falling on us, pressing us forward on to the windscreen, everything happening at once as we waited for the smash but instead coming to a standstill only a few feet from whatever it was in the road.

There was a moment of silence broken only by awful groans. We were fearful of what we should see but the reality was worse
than anything we imagined. Lying in the road, face downwards, a shapeless black bundle covered with dust, was one of the nomads. He was an old man of about seventy, blackened by the sun, with a cropped grizzled head. Something had run him down from behind and his injuries were terrible; his nose was almost completely torn off and swelling up through a tear in the back of his shirt was a great liquid bulge; but he was still conscious and breathing like a steam engine.

We wrapped him in a blanket, put a big shell dressing on the maw where his nose had been, stopped the bleeding from the back of his head and wondered what to do next. We dared not move him off the road because we had no idea what internal injuries he had, nor could we give him morphia because it seemed certain that his brain must have been injured.

Now the men of the tribe came running, attracted by the lights. They were followed by the children and then by the women. With the women came the man’s wife, a windswept black-haired creature of about thirty, who flung herself down in the dust with a jangling of gold ornaments and set up a great wailing. The rest stood in a half-circle in the light of the headlamps and looked at us silently.

At the same moment a jeep arrived, full of soldiers. One of them was a doctor who spoke English. It seemed a miracle.

He lifted the shell dressing and winced. Then he saw the great blue swelling, now growing bigger.

‘You must take him to the camp.’ (There was a military camp five miles back on the road.)

‘But if he’s moved he may die.’

‘He is going to die. You see that’ – he pointed at the bulge – ‘haemorrhage. He may live till morning. He is strong old man but there is nothing to do.’

‘You will come with us?’

‘I am going to—’ (He named a place none of us had ever heard of.) ‘It is you must take him.’

We told him that we were going to Persia. Still we did not realize our predicament.

Then it came, like a bombshell.

‘
YOU CANNOT KILL MAN AND GO AWAY. THERE WILL BE INQUIRY
.’

‘
BUT WE DIDN’T. WE FOUND HIM. LOOK HERE
.’ We showed him the tyre marks. They ended about seven feet from the body.

‘To do such damage you must travel fast.’ He pointed to the crushed offside wing, legacy of Hugh’s encounter with a London taxi. ‘But do not worry,
he
is only nomad. I am sorry for
you
.’

His men helped us place the wounded man in the back seat. When he had gone we realized that we didn’t know his name.

At the camp, a few huts under the mountain, there was no doctor. Nor could anyone speak Persian, French or German – only Turkish.

‘Bayazid, Bayazid,’ was all they could say, waving us on. With the groans of the old man in our ears and the heartrending cries of his wife from the back seat where she supported him, we drove the fifteen miles to the town.

All night we sat under the electric light in the corridor of the military hospital, smoking cigarettes, dozing, going into the room where he was, to listen to his breathing as it became louder and louder. He died horribly, early the next morning on a canvas stretcher just as it was growing light, surrounded by judges and prosecutors and interpreters screaming at him, trying to find out what had run him down, the members of his family elbowed out by official observers.

As soon as the man was dead, the nightmare of the day began. In a convoy of vehicles we returned to the scene of the accident. In ours was a Judge, who seemed hostile; a young Public Prosecutor, who didn’t; a tall Colonel with a broken nose, hard as nails like
a Liverpool policeman; a Captain, who was indifferent, neither unamiable nor amiable – nothing; an interpreter, who looked as though he had been routed out of a house of ill-fame, who spoke extraordinarily bad Levantine French of a purely declamatory kind; a number of really smelly policemen and two or three soldiers. Apart from the Interpreter, the Prosecutor spoke a few words of French but tried hard with them; the Captain not more than a dozen words of English but he was useless. All the rest spoke nothing but their native tongue. By a paradox it was the Prosecutor who seemed to offer the greatest hope. Worst of all was the Interpreter, who seemed intent on destroying us.

‘
Vous êtes Carless?
’ he inquired sardonically as I was getting into the car to drive to the place of the accident. With all the more important officials in our car, which had been emptied of luggage in order to transport them, it seemed better that Hugh shouldn’t drive.

‘
Non, M’sieur.
’

‘
Il faut que M. Carless conduit l’automobile.
’

‘
Pourquoi?
’

‘
M. le Juge l’a dit.
’

All the way to the scene of the accident they watched Hugh like a hawk. It looked very bad for him. There on the gravel road was the long swerving mark of the skid ending practically where the body had been. The space between was already ploughed up by countless footmarks, but if we had hit the old man, the force of the blow would have thrown his body almost precisely into the position in which we found it.

The interrogation went on right through the baking noonday heat until evening. Half a dozen times we were made to re-enact the accident; the road was measured; the nomad children were made to collect stones to mark the key points; drawings were made; statements were taken. All we could say was that we had
found him and that there had been no other witnesses – the nearest nomads had been nearly a mile from the road. It was not our fault, we said, you must believe us. But then there were the men of the tribe committing perjury, describing the accident, offering flowers to the Judge; while the Interpreter, sensing the dislike that we were trying so hard to conceal, redoubled his own efforts to destroy us by garbling everything we said. Worst of all they told us that ours was the only vehicle travelling towards the Customs House from the Turkish side on the evening of the accident.

Hugh was in a spot. The only hope seemed to be the Prosecutor, who had ordered the beating of several members of the tribe. ‘They are lying,’ he said, as he watched the policeman thumping them in the incandescent heat. ‘I am only interested in the
truth.
And I shall discover it.’ He was a remarkable man. But when we were alone we begged Hugh to send a cable to Ankara. He was absolutely immovable.

‘I’m going to see it through myself,’ he said. ‘If it comes to a trial there’s going to be the most shocking scandal at any rate. Whether they find me guilty or innocent, somebody will always bring it up. The only thing is to convince them that I didn’t do it at this stage before they charge me. Besides, what will my Ambassador think if I arrive in Persia under a cloud.’

Exhausted we returned to the town. On the way one of the jeeps full of policemen broke down. The Judge ordered us to abandon them. No one was sorry, they were a brutal lot. We left them honking despairingly in the darkness; the soldiers were delighted.

But there were inexhaustible supplies of policemen; at the station in Bayazid half a dozen more poured out of the building, surrounding us.

‘My God, they’re going to lock me up for the night.’ All day
Hugh had behaved with the most admirable calmness. Now for the first time he showed signs of strain.

‘
Malheureusement
,’ said the Interpreter, turning to Wanda and myself and showing a set of broken yellow teeth, ‘
M. Carless doit rester ici mais VOUS, VOUS êtes libre
.’

‘I don’t need a policeman,’ Hugh said. I had never seen him so angry. ‘You have my word. I shan’t run away.’