Our book today is Peregrine Hodson’s Under a Sickle Moon, his 1986 account of the 1984 trek he made through over a thousand miles of Afghanistan, and the book is a perfect little reminder of the three kinds of travelogue-writers: The Whining Interloper, The Seasoned Pro, and The Professional Alien. If the name “Peregrine Hodson” doesn’t give you your first clue as to which kind Hodson is, there’s also his opening declaration of his intentions in seeking out the indigenous Afghani fighters conducting a guerrilla war against the invading Soviet forces: “I wanted my presence among the mujahedin to be as unobtrusive as possible.” This has been the professed intention of the Whining Interloper since the first ancient Greek decided to take his fourteen slaves, his four cooks, his wine steward, and his favorite catamite on a roughing-it tour of Macedon.

And Hodson here carries on that proud tradition, telling his readers that he disdains heavy luggage and then itemizing the stuff he brought along: 3 pairs of cotton socks, 3 pairs of woollen socks, 3 pairs of pants, 3 shirts, needles and thread, “an assortment of pills,” 2 rolls of bandages, talcum powder, a money belt, a camera and an assortment of lenses, film, a Sony Walkman and tapes (Bob Dylan, Bach, Vivaldi), a pocket Bible, maps, soap, a spare pair of bootlaces, one pair of plimsolls, one pair of boots, one jumper, one handkerchief, one “imitation Swiss Army knife,” a phial of iodine, some glucose tablets, plasters, an aluminum water-bottle, a hand-held tape recorder, pens and pencils, notepads, a Farsi dictionary, a comb, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and, left off the itemized list, about 400 pounds of cigarettes. Yah, I’ll bet he fit right in.

Thus provisioned, our intrepid author starts at Teremangal on the Pakistan border and proceeds to complain his way inland through Afghanistan, traversing mountain passes and cold rivers and forbidding plains in and around the Panjshir Valley in the company of a small band of mujahedin. Hodson gets sick with local fevers and stomach-bugs almost before he can introduce himself, but he soldiers on, dodging Soviet attacks, warily navigating heavily-mined terrain, and gradually coming not only to know and like most of his traveling companions but also to understand something of their weird mental world:

As we talked I felt as if I had passed through an invisible barrier into another dimension governed by fundamentally different laws where the world that I had previously known had only marginal significance. Here, a man’s body was a shadow, death was a process of life and the only truth was the mystery of God’s purpose.

And the author’s long background in journalism shows itself not only in his sometimes devil-may-care approach to English grammar and syntax but also in his unfailing ability to set a good scene and fill it with memorable color – to give good copy, in other words:

An hour later we were moving again, gears grinding at every turn of the road and after a lurching, swaying climb we reached the top of the pass. Another range of mountains stretched out before us in the distance, paling into the horizon like veins of shadow in alabaster. From the summit, the road rattled down into another sunlit valley, through carefully-terraced fields of corn and barley and, at last, we arrived at another hostelry which had been built into the overhang of a large cliff. The afternoon sun fell across the sloping ground in front of a crumbling adobe building and there were the rusting remains of a jeep and a truck in the corner of the inn yard. It was the end of the road; further on there was only a narrow track along the banks of a rushing torrent.

In fact, despite its falling squarely in the Whining Interloper category of travel-writing, Under a Sickle Moon is something very near a classic for most of its length. It’s sometimes fascinating, often insightful, and always very vivid, and these strengths are only occasionally marred by the author’s near-omnipresent cultural condescension (Hodson may very well be the last author ever to use the term “urchin” with a straight face), which has him always being the adult in every scene, more sensible, more aware:

The firelight shone on the faces of the men and the sparks leapt up into the branches of the tree. The mujahedin teased the two Russians about the bombing: ‘Are you afraid of those kafirs?’ ‘Why not tell them to stop the bombing?’ ‘Do you prefer living in the Panjshir to living in Russia? It must be an unpleasant country!’ Tawfiq responded by tussling good-naturedly with a mujahed. They were both in their early twenties and as I watched them wrestling the actions of armies and politicians seemed meaningless. But I could not relax. The light of the fire was an easy target for a mortar bomb and there were no sentries posted against a surprise attack.

He loses a good deal of his minimal luggage during his long trip, and his life is often in danger, but he makes it back to civilization and his publisher’s worried embrace in due course. Naturally, he had not the faintest conception back in 1984 of the shattering resonance such terms as mujahaden or Afghanistan would take on twenty years after both he and Osama bin Laden were in the mountains dodging Soviet plane strikes. It’s doubtful that a Westerner could survive an attempt at duplicating Hodson’s adventures as they’re related in Under a Sickle Moon, which lends the book an added sad significance.