Hugh Trevor-Roper describes himself as a passionate potamolator* in a 1944 entry in The Wartime Journals. I am gratified to discover that, in a small way, I am one too.
The rivers of the East proved a disappointment for him; the Euphrates, “a dreary desert stream”; the Ganges, “a brown and wretched water”; the Indus, “a colourless channel fringed with scrub”. None could approach the rivers he fished in his beloved Northumberland. Only the Nile finds approval – “a noble river”.
Over the years I have made riparian walks along the Boyne, the Thames, and for six days in 2008, the Oxus. Without the Oxus I would not dare to call myself a potamolator. The stretch I walked was in Badakhshan in Afghanistan. We were not a small party; two old English friends, a new English friend who was making a film, a guide from Kabul, a bodyguard, a driver/cook, a local guide, six pony boys and six ponies. I found it character-building.
The Oxus, or Amu Darya as it is now known, was crossed by Alexander The Great, Genghis Khan and Marco Polo. Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron did not reach it. In the 20th century it was inaccessible as it marked the border with the Soviet Union. In the 19th century Lord Salisbury described this border with the Russian Empire as “drawing lines upon maps where no human foot has ever trod”. Lord Curzon mused romantically:
To myself the Oxus, that great parent stream of humanity, which has equally impressed the imagination of Greek and Arab, of Chinese and Tartar, and which, from a period over three thousand years ago, has successively figured in the literature of the Sanskrit Puranas, the Alexandrian historians, and the Arab geographers, has always similarly appealed. Descending from the hidden “Roof of the World”, its waters tell of forgotten peoples, and whisper secrets of unknown lands. They are believed to have rocked the cradle of our race.
Stirring stuff but I’m not planning to go back. Instead I am going to attempt a short and hot walk along the Danube.
* it’s not in my dictionary either.