A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush Read Online Free PDF

had done my first climb.
    ‘What do you call this?’ Hugh said, warily. ‘Easy, difficult or something in between?’
    ‘Moderate.’
    ‘How do they go? I’ve forgotten.’
    ‘Easy, moderate, difficult, very difficult, severe, very severe, exceptionally severe, and excessively severe.’
    ‘Oh.’
    While we were eating our sandwiches the Doctor began to describe what he called ‘The Free Rappel’. More than a year has passed since, for the first and last time, I practised this excruciatingly painful method of descending the face of a mountain. Even now I am unable to remember it without a shudder. Like the use of the bayonet, it was something to be learned, and if possible, forgotten for ever.
    ‘You first,’ said the Doctor. In dealing with him we suffered the disadvantage that he wasn’t retained at some handsome fee to teach us all this. He was in fact ruining his holiday, in order to give us a slightly more than even chance of surviving.
    ‘Put a sling round the tree and run the double rope through it; now pass it round your right thigh, between your legs; now up the back and sling it over your left shoulder so that it falls down in front. That’s right. Now walk backwards to the edge, keep the rope taut. Now keep your legs horizontal and walk down.’
    I walked down. It would have been perfect if only the face of the cliff had been smooth; unfortunately it was slightly concave,which made it difficult to keep my legs at right angles to the face. I failed to do so, slipped and went swinging backwards and forwards across the face like a pendulum, with the rope biting into my groin.
    ‘Well, you’ve learned one lesson,’ Hugh said cheerfully, when I reached the bottom after disengaging myself from the rope and swarming down in a more conventional manner.
    ‘If it’s a question of doing that again or being castrated by Mahsuds, I’ll take the Mahsuds. My groin won’t stand up to much more of this.’
    ‘You must be very sensitive,’ Hugh said. ‘Lots of girls do it.’
    ‘I’m not a girl. There must be some other way. It’s impossible in thin trousers.’
    After a large, old-fashioned tea at the inn with crumpets and boiled eggs, we were taken off to the Eckenstein Boulder. Oscar Eckenstein was a renowned climber at the end of the nineteenth century, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been the first man in this or any other country to study the technique of holds and balance on rock. He had spent his formative years crawling over the boulder that now bore his name. Although it was quite small, about the size of a delivery van, his boulder was said to apparently embody all the fundamental problems that are such a joy to mountaineers and were proving such a nightmare to us.
    For this treat we were allowed to wear gym shoes.
    Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.
    ‘ YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF . Imagine that there is a thousand-foot drop under you.’
    ‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on.’
    Back at the inn we had hot baths, several pints of beer, an enormous dinner and immediately sank into a coma. For more than forty hours we had had hardly any sleep. ‘Good training,’ was Hugh’s last muffled comment.
    By this time the waitresses at the inn had become interested in this artificial forcing process. All three of them were experienced climbers who had taken the job in the first place in order to be able to combine business with pleasure. Now they continued our climbing education.
    They worked in shifts, morning and afternoon, so that we were climbing all the time. We had never encountered anything quite like them before. At breakfast on the last day, Judith, a splendid girl with auburn hair whose father had been on Everest in 1933, told us what she had in mind. ‘Pamela