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In 1956 Adrian Cowell led an Oxford and Cambridge University expedition driving three new Land Rovers from London to Singapore. I believe this was the first and last time such a journey has succeeded, but I await refutation.

A year later I set off with an Irish friend, Johnny Clements, in a World War II bullet-scarred Jeep, which I had bought for £100, to drive to Ceylon. Johnny was the ideal travelling companion since he had but two passions in life, motor vehicles and horses, both of which he knew a great deal about. Since our Jeep spent much of its time broken down and needed extensive on the spot repairs, he was happy and I was free to dream my way through the Middle East, musing on the towers of Trebizond, wandering about the ruins of Persepolis at dawn and haggling in the markets of Tabas and Meshed or wherever we had broken down, without any sense of urgency.

After crossing Afghanistan and reaching Kabul, we decided to make a side trip over the Koh-i-Baba mountains to the Band-i Amir lakes and the Bamian Buddhas and on into the edge of the Hindu Kush. The British Embassy, which in those days welcomed the occasional traveller with generous hospitality, strongly advised us against going. The terrain would be impassable since the tracks were designed for camels and, shortly before, an American and his Swedish girlfriend had disappeared there. It was feared that he had been killed and she had been taken into a harem and would not be seen again.

We followed the ridges, teetering along razor edges with sheer drops on either side before winding down impossible slopes to camp in little green strips of valleys where poplars grew, their autumn leaves bright yellow beside the icy water. We slept in crumbling deserted forts, huddled against the bitter cold and sometimes in fortified farms.

In Kabul I had bought in the market a superior fishing rod and a case of flies left behind a decade before by a British officer on leave. I was determined to catch some of the big trout I could see in the clear streams that coursed down each valley floor. One afternoon I left Johnny working underneath the jeep and wandered out of sight to an open meadow where the silence was absolute. I became absorbed and oblivious.

A sound like distant thunder made me look up at the rich blue cloudless sky before I turned to see twenty wild horsemen in turbans and flowing robes bearing down on me. They carried long-barrelled rifles and had daggers in their belts. Beside their spirited horses loped large, hairy hounds. With their Genghis Khan moustaches and fine, aquiline noses they were almost caricatures of the bandits we had been warned about. I should have been frightened but all I could think was that if I had to go I could not have found a more romantic end.

Forming a perfect half circle between me and escape, their horses reared as they came to a halt and then stood with heaving sides as they watched me reel in my line. With my very few words of Persian I greeted them while they stared at me in stony silence. Bowing towards the water, I indicated that the horses might like to drink and that the fish were not biting anyway. Failing to break the ice, I dismantled the rod and walked along the line patting the horses’ necks and expressing exaggerated admiration. Suddenly the tension broke and loud guffaws shattered the silence. The undoubted chief, so swathed in bandoliers of ammunition that bullets fired at him would have bounced off, reached down and grabbed my hand. Thinking innocently that he wanted to shake it, I gave it to him freely, only to find it lashed with a leather thong and clamped between the stirrup and his foot as he spurred his horse into a gallop.

I flew beside him, taking giant strides so as not to fall, until we came upon the Jeep, from the underneath of which Johnny’s feet poked out. Nothing ever surprised Johnny and the possible danger of the situation never occurred to him. But he knew a good horse when he saw one and, heading straight for the finest stallion, he began to admire its finer points. Horse language is universal and he was immediately recognised as an expert and therefore, unlike me, a man to be reckoned with. My hand was released and his was shaken all round.

They played with us for a while, charging at us in two battle lines to see if our nerves held and showing how they could lean right out of the saddle to pluck things from the ground. Their rifles were mostly Russian and the frontier, marked by what used to be called the Oxus River (now the Amudarya), lay not far to the north. I mentioned Samarkand and they nodded vigorously, indicating they had just come from there.

There were two teenage boys in the group who rode wild little ponies and grinned with pure happiness as they dashed about. They seemed to know that their lives were the envy of their contemporaries throughout the world and I thought they looked on us with pity. God knows what has happened to them as, over the last forty years, their country degenerated into civil war and the land became strewn with mines.

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