Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) ends with an account of an evening he, and travelling companion Hugh Carless, spent with Wilfred Thesiger in 1956 on the banks of the upper Panjshir river in the Hindu Kush. Newby and Carless had spent three weeks attempting, unsuccessfully, to reach the then unclimbed summit of Mir Samir. It was Newby's first expedition and at the point of meeting Thesiger, his journey was nearing its end. Thesiger, an experienced explorer who had already undertaken several wellpublicised and critically acclaimed expeditions in the Middle East to areas largely unknown to Western travellers, was, by contrast, just beginning his journey. Newby's account has been described by Geoffrey Moorhouse as ‘one of the most hilarious endings in modern English literature’ in which he casts himself as blundering and inexperienced in the face of Thesiger, the hardy Etonian traditionalist. The meeting stands not only as an encounter between two great literary talents but as a moment that symbolises the coming together of two very different perspectives on travel and travel writing set against a backdrop of post-war politics and the decline of the British Empire. In this respect, their meeting is symbolic of the political and cultural ambiguities and fissures of this post-imperial period, a period characterised by both ‘the dismantling of traditional institutions of colonial power, and [the] search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era’. The meeting of Thesiger and Newby, the ‘quixotic Victorian and the modern amateur’, represents both a romanticisation of the past and a reaction to the loss of this past. Indeed, it has acquired an almost mythical status; as Carless has noted, it has been likened, rather dramatically, to ‘the encounter between young Henry Stanley and the ageing Dr. Livingstone in 1871’.

Significantly, Thesiger's paper ‘A Journey in Nuristan’, published in The Geographical Journal (1957), makes only a passing reference to meeting Newby and Carless. His later publication Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad (1979), which includes a chapter on his travels in Nuristan in 1956, also only contains a passing reference to meeting Newby and Carless.