After a good few years in the printing industry I had had enough. I had been worn down by the daily grind. One day it was actually all too much, and I thought enough was enough! I rang up a mate and his phone went to message bank I blurted something stupid like let’s climb a mountain in the middle of nowhere or or or or! ……..any ideas? Carless is survived by his wife and by Ronnie, the elder of their two sons; the younger, Roger, predeceased him.

Kari Herbert noted in The Guardian 's list of travel writer's favourite travel books that she had inherited a "well-loved copy" of the book from her father, the English polar explorer Wally Herbert. "Like Newby, I was in a soulless job, desperate for change and adventure. Reading A Short Walk was a revelation. The superbly crafted, eccentric and evocative story of his Afghan travels was like a call to arms." [34] Outside magazine includes A Short Walk among its "25 essential books for the well-read explorer", [39] while Salon.com has the book in its list of "top 10 travel books of the [20th] century". [40] The Daily Telegraph too enjoyed the English humour of the book, including it in a list of favourite travel books, and describing Newby and Carless's meeting with the explorer Wilfred Thesiger as a "hilarious segment". It quotes "We started to blow up our air-beds. 'God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger." [41] The Swedish journalist and travel writer Tomas Löfström [ sv] noted that the meeting with Thesiger represented, in Newby's exaggerated account, a collision between two generations of travel writers who travelled, wrote, and related to strangers quite differently. [42]Anon (2002). "Hugh Michael Carless, CMG" (PDF). British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, Churchill College, Cambridge. p.9. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 August 2011 . Retrieved 4 April 2013. From this launch point comes a perfect example of Newby’s deft skills in capturing characters with a flurry of impressions and metaphors. Her is his first sight of a pushy female buyer from New York City in the process of disrupting company operations with her histrionics and scehemes: Newby and Carless climb 2,000 feet out of the valley to reach Arayu village. At Warna they rest by a waterfall with mulberry trees. They walk on, Newby dreaming of cool drinks and hot baths. They struggle on over a high cold pass. The last village of Nuristan, Achagaur, is peopled by Rajputs who claim to come from Arabia. They reach the top of the Arayu pass [27] and cheerfully descend on the far side. They meet the explorer and author of Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger, who is disgusted by their air-beds and calls them "a couple of pansies". [28] [29] Reception [ edit ]

Newby has a very enjoyable style of writing. Very English, very much tongue in cheek, resulting in the most terrible of circumstances being described as only minor annoyances along the way.His style of writing is like building a straight road, and every now and then build a kink in it, then continue to build the straight road, and add another kink at a random spot, then keep building the straight road, and so on.

Margalit Fox, writing Newby's obituary in The New York Times, noted that the trip was the one that made him famous, and states that "As in all his work, the narrative was marked by genial self-effacement and overwhelming understatement." She cites a 1959 review in the same publication by William O. Douglas, later a Supreme Court judge, who called the book "a chatty, humorous and perceptive account", adding that "Even the unsanitary hotel accommodations, the infected drinking water, the unpalatable food, the inevitable dysentery are lively, amusing, laughable episodes." [43] Eric Newby must have been aware of the curtain being drawn on mountain adventures in written form, so he structured his book in very different way. Instead of presenting himself and his partner Hugh Carless as mountain conquering heroes, he honestly depicts themselves for what they really were - two self-indulgent clueless men who impose themselves on locals in a poor nation. They are bullying their way to be dragged up steep mountain valleys close to the high point of their fancy - a mountain top they have not a slight chance of reaching. The account of their adventures written in this ironic self-deprecating way is like a breath of fresh air in the oxygen and imagination deprived atmosphere of mountain literature. Topsy Turvy. I started off not really liking the two main protagonists - they came across as a couple of English upper class twits who think nothing of buying a car and driving it to Tehran. Hardly the norm in 1950s Britain. But, slowly Eric's self-deprecating humour and the warmth he shows to the rest of his party won me over. Frater wrote that the book had "become the literary equivalent of a listed building", but that he far preferred Love and War. [29]The Austrian alpinist Adolf Diemberger wrote in a 1966 report that in mountaineering terms Newby and Carless's reconnaissance of the Central Hindu Kush was a "negligible effort", admitting however that they "almost climbed it". [47] The climb was more warmly described in the same year as "The first serious attempt at mountaineering in that country [the Afghan Hindu Kush]" by the Polish mountaineer Boleslaw Chwascinski. [5] Before falling asleep, having long since lost all sense of time, I looked at the calendar in my diary. The date was the twenty-third of July. Only fourteen days had passed since we had set off from Kabul. It seemed like a lifetime. p.208

Hugh comes across as this mysterious, aloof, travel partner whom Newby is able to portray with gut wrenching humor. Part of the success of the book is how they play off each other. Notable addition to the literature of unorthodox travel ... tough, extrovert, humorous and immensely literate' Times Literary Supplement One of the greatest travel classics from one of Britain's best-loved travel writers, this edition includes new photographs, an epilogue from Newby's travelling companion, Hugh Carless, and a prologue from one of Newby's greatest proponents, Evelyn Waugh. Fox, Margalit (24 October 2006). "Eric Newby, 86, Acclaimed British Travel Writer, Dies". The New York Times . Retrieved 4 April 2013.urn:lcp:shortwalkinhindu00eric_0:epub:61fcce03-2a36-495b-8adb-914566f30566 Extramarc OhioLINK Library Catalog Foldoutcount 0 Identifier shortwalkinhindu00eric_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t8v99cm1c Isbn 0140095756 Waldmann, Greg (1 July 2016). "From the Archives: Summer Reading 2015 – Cool Reads". Open Letters Monthly | An Arts and Literature Review . Retrieved 20 February 2018. A classic of travel writing, ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ is Eric Newby’s iconic account of his journey through one of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses on earth. George, Edward Mace (23 October 2006). "Idiosyncratic travel writer from another age, and author of the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 April 2013.