The "Map to illustrate a journey in Nuristan by Eric Newby and Hugh Carless in 1956", shows an area of 75 x 55 miles covering the Panjshir valley to the Northwest, and Nuristan and the Pushal valley to the Southeast; it has a small inset of Central Asia showing the area's location to the Northeast of Kabul. The other map, "Nuristan", covers a larger area of about 185 x 140 miles, showing Kabul and Jalalabad to the South, and Chitral and the Pakistan region of Kohistan to the East. A two-page preface by the novelist Evelyn Waugh recommends the book, remarking on its "idiomatic, uncalculated manner", and that the "beguiling narrative" is "intensely English". He hopes that Newby is not the last of a "whimsical tradition". He explains that Newby is not the other English writer of the same name and confesses (or pretends) that he began to read it thinking that it was the other man's work. He sketches out the "deliciously funny" account of Newby selling women's clothes, and the "call of the wild" (he admits it is an absurdly trite phrase) that led him to the Hindu Kush. Waugh ends by advising the "dear reader" to "fall to and enjoy this characteristic artifact." The book is narrated in the first person by Newby. Newby begins with an anecdotal description of his frustration with life in the fashion business in London, and how he came to leave it. He tells how he and his friend Hugh Carless receive brief training in mountaineering technique, on boulders and small cliffs in North Wales. The inn's waitresses are expert climbers; they take Newby and Carless up a difficult climbing route, "Ivy Sepulchre" on Dinas Cromlech. Newby drives to Istanbul with his wife, Wanda. Meeting Carless, they drive across Turkey to Persia (present day Iran). They brake to an emergency stop on the road, just short of a dying nomad, and with difficulty convince the police they did not cause the death. Wanda returns home and the men cross Persia and Afghanistan, driving 5,000 miles (8,000 km) in a month, through Herat to Kandahar and Kabul. There are comic touches, as when "The proprietor Abdul, a broken-toothed demon of a man, conceived a violent passion for Hugh."