When Eric Newby, improbably earning his living in the London haute couture trade, sent his fateful cable - CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? - it was the first set in a classic journey, from Mayfair to the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. As a more recent generation of travelers has discovered, Afghanistan can be an inhospitable place as this truly diverting and wonderfully evocative book shows, it is also one of the most spectacularly beautiful wildernesses on earth.