Huns and piles of skulls

The Khyber Pass is a road 33 miles long and just 50 feet wide at its narrowest point. It has been used as a hypodermic syringe for injecting armies and ideologies into the Indian sub-continent and then withdrawing loot ever since Alexander the Great marched through in the 4th century BC. It is also perfect bandit country, where a handful of men in the heights with rifles can hold off a battalion. The locals have long seen it as natural resource; a bottleneck that facilitates extortion from travellers at their mercy. "The most common reaction to me," writes Paddy Docherty in his military history of the region, "was a profound and touching hospitality." However, he had an armed guard to protect against kidnap and murder, adding "I felt that this reflected a larger and more ancient truth about the Khyber region: life is hard and people must treat others with some suspicion in order to survive." It might alternatively reflect the truth that life is even harder if you decide to make it so for one another.

That said, the people of the region have been punished for gentleness several times over the centuries. Rulers converted to Buddhism only to find that pacifism ill-equipped them for retaining power. In the fifth and sixth centuries they suffered the depredations of the "White Huns" - so called because, according to the Roman historian Procopius, they were "the only ones among the Huns who have white bodies and countenances which are not ugly". Procopius must have had strange tastes, because the White Huns' chief contributions to culture were slashing their own faces with knives and binding their childrens' skulls so that they grew conical heads. Lucky for them there were no low-hanging branches in the Khyber Pass.

When they rode into India, they could not believe their luck at finding large communities of Buddhists who could be slaughtered without reply. The White Huns were vicious, warlike and utterly useless in arts and crafts - even the most right-on anthropologist would use the label "barbarian" here. But even Buddhists were not immune to the peculiar mountain air of the Northwest Frontier. In the third century BC, the emperor Ashoka forgot all about compassion when he heard that a Hindu holy man had broken a statue of the Buddha in the city of Pundravardhana. He ordered that every one of the 18,000 inhabitants be executed.

It was the Turks and not the Arabs who brought Islam to India beyond the province of Sind. Full-blown imperialism came slightly later, with theft and the enslavement of the locals driving the initial raids through the Khyber Pass. As the Koran puts it in a line that Mahmoud of Ghazni liked to carve on his minarets, "God has promised you rich booty... And God knows of other spoils which you have not yet taken." These spoils included 53,000 slaves taken in a single expedition in 1018. The worst excesses were excused on the grounds that much of India's treasure was housed in idolatrous Hindu temples. For example, the revenues of 10,000 villages went towards the upkeep of the great temple of Somnath where, for 3,000 Brahmin priests and hundreds of dancing girls, the centrepoint of worship was a giant stone phallus. The victorious Mahmoud smashed it in with a blow from his mace and used the fragments to build mosque steps.

Another of Mahmoud's favourite lines from the Koran had it that God "has stayed your enemies' hands, so that He may make your victory a sign to true believers". Unfortunately, He later seemed to favour an ever crueller power. The Mongol sack of Delhi in 1398 led by Timur - himself a Muslim - saw pyramids of skulls assembled in the streets. As the then dead Genghis Khan once said of another defeated populace, "Your sins must have been terrible indeed for God to send me to punish you."

Despite the colourful details, there is a frustrating lack of argument, opinion and analysis in the book, and the author's own journey through the Northwest Frontier seems to have passed without incident. If he got into any scrapes or had any adventures then he has not recorded them here. Although he met the Northern Alliance's famous General Dostum in Afghanistan, he relates only an inconsequential chat about the local sport being played better elsewhere.

An Asian immigrant once told Bernard Bresslaw that he loved to watch Carry on up the Khyber as he liked to see the mountains of his "old country". Bresslaw did not have the heart to tell him that it was actually filmed in Snowdonia. The movie was none the worse for it, and the same could have been said of Paddy Docherty's book had he declined to risk his life for his research. The material that makes his book worth reading was collected back home, in a library.

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