On the way Newby describes his very brief training in mountaineering in North Wales, a stop in Istanbul, and a nearly-disastrous drive across Turkey and Persia.

They are driven out to the Panjshir Valley, where they begin their walk, with many small hardships described in a humorous narrative, supported by genuine history of Nuristan and brief descriptions of the rare moments of beauty along the way.

Disagreements with Newby's Persian-speaking companion Hugh Carless, and odd phrases in an antique grammar book, are exploited to comic effect.

In 1956 at the age of 36, Eric Newby ended his London career in fashion[2] and decided impulsively to travel to a remote corner of Afghanistan where no Englishman had ventured for 60 years.

[3] He sent a telegraph to his friend the diplomat Hugh Carless, then due to take up his position as First Secretary in Tehran later that year, requesting he accompany him on an expedition to Northern Afghanistan.

[4] They were poorly prepared and inexperienced, but Newby and Carless vowed to attempt Mir Samir, a glacial and then unclimbed[5] 20,000 foot peak in the Hindu Kush.

The other map, "Nuristan", covers a larger area of about 185 × 140 miles, showing Kabul and Jalalabad to the South, and Chitral and the Pakistan region of Kohistan to the East.

[10] A two-page preface by the novelist Evelyn Waugh recommends the book, remarking on its "idiomatic, uncalculated manner", and that the "beguiling narrative" is "intensely English".

He sketches out the "deliciously funny" account of Newby selling women's clothes, and the "call of the wild" (he admits it is an absurdly trite phrase) that led him to the Hindu Kush.

The inn's waitresses are expert climbers; they take Newby and Carless up a difficult climbing route, Ivy Sepulchre[a] on Dinas Cromlech.

Wanda returns home and the men cross Persia and Afghanistan, driving 5,000 miles (8,000 km) in a month, through Herat to Kandahar and Kabul.

Newby describes the geography of Nuristan "walled in on every side by the most formidable mountains" and a little history, with the legend of descent from Alexander the Great, the British imperial adventures, and pre-war German expeditions.

They come to a ruinous summer pasture village, and eat local food: boiled milk, the yellow crust that forms on cream, and fresh bread.

Newby tries to learn a little of the Bashguli language from a 1901 Indian Staff Corps grammar, which contains an absurd selection of phrases; the book exploits some of these to comic effect.

Their guide does not let them camp in a grove of mulberry trees full of girls and young women, but chooses a dirty place under a cliff.

Walking down from the village of Lustagam they pass hand-made irrigation canals of hollowed-out halved tree trunks on stone pillars.

[37] Boyd Tonkin, writing in The Independent, called the book a "classic trek", and commented that while it is told light-heartedly, Newby, despite his comic gift, always retained his "capacity for wonderment".

[42] 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] The American novelist Rick Skwiot enjoyed the "blithely confident Brit's" narrative style, finding echoes of its concept, structure and humour in Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods.

"Somehow they blunder on toward their whimsical destination", he remarks, the "seductive and tickling narrative" told with "understatement, self-effacement, savage wit, honed irony, and unrelenting honesty."

The resulting "atmosphere of enhanced affectation is exploited to maximum comic effect" in books such as A Short Walk, which they called "an acclaimed post-Byronic escapade in which gentlemanly theatrics come to assume the proportions of full-blown farce.

"[45] The essayist and professor of English Samuel Pickering called A Short Walk and Newby's later book Slowly Down the Ganges "vastly entertaining", reminiscent of earlier British travellers such as Robert Byron (The Road to Oxiana, 1937), but also "episodic, each day cluttered with odd occurrences that are striking because they occur in exotic lands".

Pickering noted that Newby's combination of whimsy with close observation fitted in to the British travel writing tradition.

[46] 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".

[5] In January 2012, an expedition under the auspices of the British Mountaineering Council, citing the "popular adventure book", attempted the first winter ascent of Mir Samir, but it was cut short by an equipment theft and "very deep snow conditions and route finding difficulties".