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But with that certainty came an appalling and unanticipated terror. They had travelled to Kabul, never knowing what they would find there; had presented themselves at the gates; had submitted to their guesthouse garrison without more than a weak tremor of dread. And now, with the certainty that they would do what they had arrived to do, terror set upon Burnes. No; not quite that; it was not that something had struck at him. It was more that something had left him. As if, with the ordinary words, some great certain presence in him had abruptly fled, clearing the walls and windows, the barriers of his own skin without an effort. He sat, trying, almost, not to shake with the black terror of his own certainty, fleeing him, and waited for it to leave. It was the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and it began in this room, it began its furious flight from this little room, and fled from him, his fear, his terror, his knowledge. He did not know, quite, what it was, what certainty he was losing with this flight, as if of wind; he could only feel it leaving, with no sense at all of what would be left of him when it was gone, what strength to carry out his task. He waited saying nothing, as if in thought, and in a moment it was over; the fleeing strength and certainty had, just at the door, turned and looked at him in quiet curiosity. At him: at the shell of what had housed all that certainty for so long. Turned and looked and left, leaving nothing but Burnes. He sat for a moment in silence, wanting not to show any fear, to anyone, ever again.
7.
In these long nights, Burnes dreamt of Montrose. He could not help it.
You went to the door of your chamber, and turned, and looked. The thin curtains were blowing in the summer breeze, and already, at this moment in the morning, the sun was lighting the thin white cloth, there at the narrow windows. You looked down at yourself, and there too, your white nightgown billowed out with the cool Scottish morning breeze, lit with the cool Scottish morning light. And there were your boy’s feet, there, on the floor, blue almost with the cold, and veiny. For a moment, you could go back and hug yourself in bed, while the first of the morning; there, your bed, cut and rumpled and squashy with your sleep; or you could do what you could do, run downstairs in your bare feet and throw open the Montrose door to the Montrose morning. Rub your eyes and moan like a dove with your sleep; push your fists into your eye sockets, and fret your sides with your own quick warming embrace. And there. The blue sky; the birds at song; the smell of the morning’s first earth and, behind you, the first clanking noises of the house, preparing itself for the day, as the maids raked the fire and the girl brought in the milk. Yes, he would run, in this cold he could see, and not only feel, down to look at the dreamt Montrose morning.
But then he turned and looked at Montrose, and it too had become an orchard city, high in the dry brown mountains; Scotland turned to Islam, the granite city turned to a city of mulberries, and the perfume wafting over Burnes’s sleep was not heather, the song was not that of the starling, but the heavy blossom of mulberry, the clean song of nightingales. It was as if he woke, and went to the Montrose window, and outside, there were orchards and orchards of mulberries. Mulberries outside, weighing the tree down, the tree glimpsed through the open Scottish door. And there, there, was a boy, a curious near-boy, a near-warrior, barely uniformed, a powdery beard against his soft skin, scurrying away outside, peering in at Burnes, in his high gleaming magnificence. And in his wake a sweet whiff of the many-perfumed city, a waft of dung and smoke and the high Scottish, yes, heathery Scottish mountain air; and the scent, too, of mulberries, growing outside somewhere, clotted on the trees, fallen and thick on the roads as dung. Burnes looked down at himself, and his bare nightgowned flesh was glittering with brass, with spurs, his boots bright with polish, but stained with the fruit flesh, the limbs of one who had walked long and far through the orchards. And as he woke, Burnes thought of something he knew, even after waking, to be true: that the fruit for which the English had the single name of mulberry had in Persian six separate names, and in Pushto, the language of the far high hills, the fruit had so many names that no one could ever know them all; a fruit which, before, had seemed single turned in Burnes’s dream into one with so many names that no man had ever counted them all, and no man would ever risk reciting the many divine names of the divine fruit.
They must have come early, the next morning. Burnes woke from his dream, and already he could hear the whinnying of the strange horses out there in the garden, their unfamiliar-sounding jingle. He lay there on the padded floor, his eyes open, and could see from their unnatural stillness that Gerard and Mohan Lal, too, had woken, and were lying without moving, their eyes closed, feigning sleep so as not to move, not just yet. He lay and listened to the terrifying noise of the horses. They were down there, the men who would take them to the Emperor, of whom they knew nothing, of whose cruelty and goodness they knew nothing. Down there, waiting with all the patience they were born with.
They dressed quickly, and after a breakfast of milk and flat bread, went down to their escorts. They were there, sitting peaceably on their horses, not dismounting, just waiting as they had waited, surely, for an hour or two. Burnes led the other two out. Mohan Lal awkwardly salaamed, a gesture which they returned perfunctorily; their unfamiliar, unwelcoming look at the guide confirming what Burnes had always felt, that his frankly inquiring gaze, noting down, say, a particular stirrup loop as peculiar to the region, was always one guaranteed to bring suspicion and dislike down, not just on him but on the whole party.
It was the first time out of the house in days, and Burnes could not help feeling stiff. He stretched, awkwardly, as the light almost hurt his eyes, and for the first time, he saw the city. Not arriving for the first time, where novelty coloured the vision, not through a window, making distant what was there to be seen, but seeing a city which, it now seemed, he knew from his memory. A scattered city, lying in the scoop of the earth, the brown cubed houses lying against the vast slow rise of the brown mountains like dice in a cupped pair of hands. All the way they had ridden here, the earth had seemed dully brown, unchanging, empty, like the momentarily empty earth after waterless months, from which all colour had been sucked, leaving only brown. But now, coming out into the air, it seemed as if everything had enriched, multiplied in the unchanging earth; the dazed eye, looking down from the dazzling clean blue of the sky, saw a hundred, a thousand tints in the bare mountain earth; browns whitening with chalk, a streak of vivid yellow, a shadow going into mauve in the early-morning sun. Everything, he saw, pausing here before the bleak dazzling sun, could be found here; horses, orchards, sky, water, earth, and now, waiting for the high remote Emperor, he seemed in terror and jubilation to see everything there was, everything, there in the earth.
‘Where are we going to?’ Burnes shouted to the mounted guards. He was glad to hear his voice sounded authoritative.
‘The Bala Hissar,’ one said, not looking down at him.
‘Is it far?’ Burnes called.
‘No,’ another horseman said. ‘Not far.’
‘The Emperor is waiting,’ the first horseman said. ‘It is time to go. Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ Burnes said. ‘Yes, we are ready.’
They set off, their guard not dismounting but hemming them in between the horses’ high flanks. The horses walked with such stately gravity that at one moment, one of them could not bear the tenseness of the slow walk and wheeled abruptly off, circling like a hawk in the street before the rider brought the beast back. There could have been something brutal, a blunt assertion of power, in their making the party walk between the horses, like tethered slaves. They may have felt this – Gerard certainly felt this, to judge by his clenched-buttock stride, now the result of his august pride as much as his fluid bowels – but Burnes couldn’t feel any outrage in himself at this treatment. Rather, he felt, in his glittering exotic clothes, dress uniform draped splendidly with the heavy red court robes, like a pilgrim. An unworthy pilgrim, walking humbly up the hill to the great sawn-off blunt rock, the palace, the Bala Hissar, in the middle of which vast plain mass sat the Amir. Up there was the Emperor, politely patient, waiting; you could feel his calm wait here, walking the street between their mounted companions. And the mounted companions, too, seemed quiet, subdued by the Emperor’s patient quiet. What splendour was up there, Burnes could not tell; but he felt that there would be none. This city, plain-dressed, the high clean air given its florid perfume by the fruit trees, wasn’t ruled by some fabulous potentate; he could feel it. No cushion-fleshed tyrant in a pile of rubies sat up there, watching them approach; just a mind.
As they walked through the narrow mud streets, they were given a thorough inspection. The children came to the windows, and stood, staring; shadows, in the upstairs shuttered windows, showed them that the women of the city, too, were curious. The shops in the bazaar were opening, and, behind the piles of fruit, of bags of spice, the merchants and customers, sitting in the early sun, followed the procession with humorous open eyes. Over the city, the Bala Hissar, a great shapeless piece of power, and they walked the streets, not responding to the keen attention of the city.
They walked on, not speaking to each other or their guards. Occasionally, over their heads, one of the horsemen would call out to another, or to someone in the street. They called out in Pushto, and each time Gerard, walking by Burnes’s side, stiffened, knowing that they didn’t want to be understood. Burnes worked on his patience; if Gerard could be kept from speaking at least until his easily-ignited fury had died down, that would make things a great deal easier. After they had run the gauntlet of the bazaar, the houses seemed to drop away. The hill of the Bala Hissar itself was bare, clear for a siege.
This last stretch, as the road turned upwards, seemed to divide and stretch before them, and it seemed to Burnes, as the Bala Hissar receded from them, that this was the road in the paradox; that with each step, the road doubled in length, that each step grew smaller and more painful, and the great fortress would never be reached, as they laboured at its gates, endlessly. But it was mere minutes before they were there at the open gates, and their escort turned, at some unseen signal, and rode off, calling to each other, now, in Persian.
8.
A small man ran up to them and beckoned quickly with his two hands, scowling. He seemed alone, and they followed him into the big square court of the palace. It was quite empty, and they walked briskly across it into another opening, the doors swinging open. Two boys were lounging there, each with a jezail slung across his back, each turbanned massively, and they made some side-to-side swing of the head, acknowledging not them, but their little guide. He gestured and beckoned continuously, and they followed him into another hall, where a group of more soldierly youth stood, waiting, and then into another. As they walked through the rooms of the palace, they acquired some kind of attendance behind them, the boys forming a chattering guard behind them, and all the time the little man, dancing, beckoning, in front of them. They walked through one room after another, the heavy blunt-carved dark wood doors opening weightily, and in every room there was almost no furniture, almost nothing, just plain plaster walls, the narrow windows of a palace in a country which knew all about heat, and about cold. Abruptly, they all fell silent, and at a circling gesture from their guide, stopped. The guide looked them over, critically, as if for the first time, and, with a circling gesture, stirring something in the air, a half-smile, a nod at the guards at the door, conveyed somehow that here they were. The doors were brought open and their guards fell back behind them, as they walked, in an awe they tried to subdue, into the great hall of the Amir. And there he was.
The hall was bare, long and square, with a single step at the end rising to a modest platform. There was nothing in the room except a huge Turkey carpet, rich and deep as rubies. At the far end of the hall, perched on the edge of the step, sat the Amir. A group of courtiers and mullahs, ten or twelve, stood behind him; the courtiers wore swords dangling from their kummur-bund. As they entered, the group seemed to stiffen, and drew back, forming a little fan around the Amir, who did not rise. They bowed deeply from the far end of the hall, rose very slowly, and walked forward. Every five paces, they stopped and bowed again, an obeisance returned with a tiny benevolent craning of the neck by the Amir. It wasn’t a court ceremonial; just a ritual concocted to show the greatest possible deference, which, it was hoped, the Amir would take as some court ritual of Europe. Finally, at ten paces from the Amir, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads very slowly to the floor, counted to five, as agreed, and raised them again.
The Amir was smiling. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. He was a sharp-featured man, a scimitar of a nose scything through his beautiful humorous face, and his big dark eyes danced, curious or amused, from one to another. His robes were plain, and, like the earth, a dozen shades of brown, and wrapped around his body as he sat, cross-legged, on the edge of the step. By his side, the nobles looked savage, graceless, bundled like washing. He gave a small bow from the neck, not in humility but, as it were, cueing Burnes to speak.
‘Emperor,’ Burnes began. ‘Lord of the distant horizon, Emperor of the wind, King of the Afghans, Heir of Israel …’
That was not quite right. He continued.
‘Heir of Israel, we come to offer you the shade of our friendship. May the shade of our friendship always offer you rest and solace, may the waters of the love between our empires never run dry.’
‘May the song of the nightingale always bless your counsels,’ the Amir returned, ‘and may the wise horses of your empire bear you without tiring to your last home. Sit down, sit down.’
Burnes, Gerard and Mohan Lal awkwardly forced themselves into a cross-legged posture; a painful business in high-topped boots.
‘Greetings, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir said. ‘Your name is auspicious.’
An old and now familiar joke, from much repetition. Memories were long here, and every single Afghan, on hearing Burnes’s name, had asked him if he were Alexander the Great, come to rob the country again. It had seemed unfortunate; now, he had come to see it was just their sense of humour. ‘There is nothing, thank God, I share with the Greek Alexander, and come not to plunder your kingdom, but in all respect.’
The nobles, teetering with nervously thrilled anxiety, now gave way to a general giggling, stopped with one quick sideways jerk of the Amir’s head. Behind him, the two pairs of double doors, one on either side of the throne room, were half opened; it had clearly been a great honour that, on their entry into the Bala Hissar, the double doors were all opened. Out of the doors came now a procession of cooks, bearing great dishes of heavy beaten silver, starting with a whole steaming lamb, lying on its back with its legs pathetically upwards in a sea of steaming spinach. It was, Burnes estimated, ten o’clock in the morning, and Gerard was tensing at the sight.
‘How many kings are there in Europe?’ Dost Mohammed suddenly asked. ‘And Napoleon, is he still King in Europe?’
‘Ah—’ Burnes said, thrown off balance. But the Amir seemed hardly to mind.
‘I do not understand,’ the Amir continued. ‘It seems that the lands of the kings of Europe march with each other. Are they on good terms, or do they fight over their borders? How can they exist without destroying one another? I am most interested, Sikunder Burnes, to have the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge.’
Burnes recollected himself. He had been made sleepy by the East, and had been preparing for a long series of introductory gestures; the mutual flattery for half an hour, the commendation and reluctant acceptance of every single dish, the entertainment from the professional anecdotalist. He hadn’t anticipated anything like conversation starting up for at least two hours.
‘There are many countries in Europe, great Amir,’ he began. Dost Mohammed, gathering up his retinue, gestured them to their places on the carpet around the colossal morning feast. He drew Burnes to his right side, and seemed to be listening with great attention, the Amir’s big dark sad eyes fixed on him as he spoke. When the list had come to an end, he took a deep hissing breath through his nose, like a horse after exercise.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that your advancement in civilization, as you describe it, does not save you from war and dispute.’
‘It is to be feared so.’
The minor nobility and clergy, all trembling with curiosity, now responded to some kind of sign from the Amir, and fell on the food with a terrible cheerful eagerness.
‘It is said,’ a very young prince asked, ‘that in your country, the flesh of pigs is eaten. Is this true, Sikunder Burnes?’
The Amir waved away the question before Burnes could answer it. ‘Tell me about taxation in Europe,’ he said. ‘How do your kings collect money to conduct their wars?’
‘Such a thing can barely interest the great Amir,’ Gerard interposed, ‘so peaceful are his lands and the lives of the people under his wise rule.’
‘Nevertheless, I want to know,’ the Amir said, not taking his eyes off Burnes. ‘Tell me about taxation.’
‘And you, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘What do you know of the people of Europe? Have you, with your own eyes, seen the embassies of Russia?’
Dost Mohammed took a piece of bread, and chewed it, thoughtfully.
‘Pray, sir,’ Dr Gerard said abruptly. ‘What are your times of prayers?’
The mullah, on safe ground here, immediately began to rattle off the list. Gerard interrupted him. ‘You are enjoined, I think, by the Koran, to pray before sunrise and after sunset?’
‘Yes, yes,’ the mullah said. ‘Yes, and damned be the infidel who neglects such prayers.’
Gerard could hardly contain himself, his feet twitching with his suppressed theological glee. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he went on, his eyebrows shooting up in theatrical amazement, ‘how one of the faithful would carry out this injunction in the Arctic Circle?’
The mullah hardly paused. ‘In every part of the world are the injunctions of the Koran to be obeyed, except in some circumstances while travelling, when it is written that—’
‘Quite, quite, quite,’ Gerard went on. ‘But in the Arctic Circle, man.’
‘The—’ the mullah paused, uncertain.
‘The Arctic Circle is the utmost point of the earth, sir, the Ultima Thule, the furthest point on the geographical globe, far north of any inhabited or habitable spot. It exhibits – and this is my query – a seasonal curiosity, for five or six months of the year. In the winter, the sun does not rise; in the summer, the sun does not set, and the barren northern lands are plunged into a night which lasts for months, and, in the summer, a perpetual day. Sir, I repeat my question. How may these prayers be performed in a land where there is neither sunrise nor sunset? Are we to suppose that the faithful Esquimaux are only enjoined to perform their devotions twice a year?’
Gerard was enjoying himself too much, Burnes reflected, and now the mullah had had a moment to consider the question and make something up. He glanced at the Amir, and, to his slight surprise, there was no sense of insult there, but, over the sharp hooked nose, a glittering and amused look in the eyes. Dost Mohammed, too, was enjoying himself.
‘Quite, quite,’ the mullah said. ‘The Prophet himself visited the faithful Eska, the faithful Eska. It is said. And in such countries it has always been the custom that prayers are not required, in those countries, yes, it is sufficient to repeat the Quluma.’
‘Permit me to ask, sir,’ Burnes cut in with a confident feeling that, now, he was entertaining the Dost, ‘in which chapter of the Koran this doctrine may be found? We poor infidel, alas, may not claim to know or understand the sacred writings.’
‘Yes,’ Dost Mohammed added. ‘Yes, where is this extraordinary idea to be found? I do not remember such a thing. And when is the Prophet supposed to have found time to convert the Eska? I suppose at the same time he was travelling to Engelstan to pay his homage to Sikunder Burnes’s grandfather, fool.’
The poor mullah started to blush furiously, and the argument was taken up in the far corner of the room. Burnes dared to look directly at the Amir, who was twinkling graciously.
‘You see,’ the Amir said to Burnes, leaning over confidentially and entirely ignoring the gurgle and chatter of the debate, ‘both our fools and our wise men love to argue, and hope never to conclude their arguments. And in your country, do the wise debate, so as to outlast the nightingale’s song?’
‘From dusk to dawn, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘And in every land, I think.’
‘But your companion has made an interesting point,’ the Amir said. ‘And one which the mullahs, now, will never settle. Perhaps you should return in seven years, and see what conclusion they have reached, because I fear they will not agree today.’
The Amir looked distinctly amused by this prospect. Burnes looked at him, and the Amir looked, frankly, back; and, for once, looking into the eyes of one of the great princes of the Orient, Burnes did not feel like a rabbit transfixed by a snake.
‘The climate of your city is most healthy, great Amir,’ Burnes said, slipping back into idle compliments. ‘And the beauty of your people is the most remarkable I have ever seen in my travels.’
‘If you stay, Sikunder,’ the Amir said, shrugging briefly, ‘you will be struck by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and you will not think the climate so fine.’
‘The Wind, Amir?’
‘It strikes at travellers, and may take only one. A pestilential wind, which strikes and kills.’ The other Afghans had fallen silent now. ‘It attacks like a cold wind, and leaves the traveller senseless. And the flesh of the man struck by the Wind falls from the bones, and limbs soften and fall away from each other, and the hair falls out at the touch. A disease of the low-lands, a curse of the Wind.’
‘Pray God—’ Gerard said.
‘And now, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir went on, quite calmly. ‘Let us speak of your European alchemists.’
9.
And so, when the infidel had been fed, and watered, and dismissed for the day, Dost Mohammed looked out over his city. Dost Mohammed, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, son of Usaf, son of Yaru, son of Mohammed, son of Omar, son of Khizar, son of Ismail, son of Nek, son of Daru, son of Saifal, son of Barak, son of Abdal, Abdal the Great, father of the Afghans, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind, Emperor of the distant horizons; Dost Mohammed looked over the city in his easy splendour, and, in the empty room, let his marvellous mind fill with guile. No noise of feeling crumpled his face, and he thought as long as he could about the English. They, surely, would be useful; the heavy useful English, having money and guns and land, could usefully help the Amir to stay just as he was, just where he was, and continue in his usual ways, without offering interference, preventing trouble without knowing, exactly, what they were doing. Presently the call of the imam to prayer drifted up from the city. Dost Mohammed began, quite slowly, on his devotions. As he rose and fell, his head lifting and dropping over the divine flawed complexity of the prayer-mat, his lips muttering in the empty room, his mind continued to dwell, quite properly, on punishment. It was the Amir’s duty each night to determine the punishments to be visited on wrongdoers the next day, and it was to this which, in prayer, he now turned his mind. From the mosques in the city, a rumbling muttering of prayer filled the city with noise, thousands of the devout rising and falling, a single huge multiple sound, and Dost Mohammed rose and fell in prayer, and thought of violence. The wrongdoers the next day were a various bunch. Low thieves, the adulterous twelve-year-old wife of one of the sons of the Amir, the rebellious chief of a tribe whose lands lay just within the uncertain shifting borders of the kingdom. Hanging and beheading and dragging behind horses for the thieves, as was ordained. The adulterous princess to be thrown down the well of the Bala Hissar itself.
And, for the seditious leader – Dost Mohammed thought hard. He despised rebellion, because it always failed; and failure was what Dost Mohammed despised most, being a blot on the face of God. His head lifted and lowered above the glowing ruby prayer-mat, and for the moment he could not think of any punishment. Then he remembered the decreed fate of Sayad Ata, in his youth; he had been caught in rebellion. His fate had been to be tied down on his breast while an elephant trampled on him. Dost Mohammed, deep in prayer, remembered the devout, righteous and splendid sight of the death of Sayad Ata; how the unworthy descendant of the Prophet himself had groaned and wailed at the approach of the beast! How his followers had groaned in the crowd, not understanding where the path of right had led, as if a thousand elephants were approaching, to tread on them! How his shrieks had been stopped, like a finger placed over the hole in a leaking whistling goatskin, as his bones, all at once, had cracked and popped! How grand and dreadful the sudden gouts of blood from every orifice, bursting out like a spirit-witness to the Faith, spilling into the dust! How right and good, the decreed end of Sayad Ata! Rising and falling in his devotions, his mind filling with the happy contemplation of the exercise of justice and right, the Amir quite forgot that some other means of execution would have to be found for tomorrow’s rebellious tribesman, there being, at the moment, no imperial elephant to be had. What had happened to the imperial elephant Dost Mohammed could not, for the moment, quite recollect; whether the dingy, foul-tempered, foul-smelling and noisy beast had been borrowed by some fool son, given to another recalcitrant tribe as an expensive joke, or had simply wandered off into the hills, Dost Mohammed could not think, so firmly fixed was his mind on the imperial devotions, the imperial punishments. But soon the great Amir, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, all the way back to Abdal and the Heir of Israel himself, would have to think up some new way of putting the better class of criminal to death. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would ask the infidel if he wanted to come and see the executions. Tomorrow, indeed, he would ask the infidel how criminals were put to death in Engelstan. The infidel, after all, was bound to be full of ingenious new ideas.
At the other side of the city, the infidel was sitting or standing, and not saying anything much. Gerard had taken off his full dress uniform, and was sitting in his long thick smalls, holding but not reading a book; his mouth pursed in concentration, he was staring over the top, examining the clean rough floor. Mohan Lal had absented himself, and was in the latrines. Burnes, standing at the window, was giving way to an unfamiliar sensation, the slow scarlet flashes of terror. He had expected relief after his audience with the Amir. He had met emperors before, had met with the great of the Company and the Government. He had been ushered into the presence of the jewelled savage potentates of the East, had sat with tyrants whose teeth were blacked and pointed, as with the blood of their own children, and each time, before, had experienced the same sequence of events. Before, there had been a sort of dread, suppressed by the will like a child’s balloon held to the ground by a spreading fist; then the willed exercise of confidence as the great savage potentate, whether a pantomime cannibal king or a savage director of the Company in his Bloomsbury palace, turned his eyes to the pink-and-white stripling and listened to the cautious opinions, buried in carefully lavish flatteries. And afterwards, that sense of relief, as the fist let the balloon go and the dread flew away, away, leaving only a nervous flurry of chat.
Now Burnes did not want to chat. He felt no relief. He felt no nervousness. He felt only the same terror he had felt before they had set off for the Amir’s palace, and the kindness of the Amir only augmented the terror he had felt at his quizzing presence. All at once, he felt the full imperial splendour of the Amir’s mind, of which he had been permitted to glimpse only the merest fraction; he had recognized that here was no ostentatious potentate, but the weight and show of the imperial, the Napoleonic mind up there could not be greater if it buried itself in rubies. He was not, to be perfectly honest, quite sure what if anything had happened to them, up there in the Bala Hissar; only that tomorrow it was going to happen again. Tomorrow, they would go back, and tomorrow it would be the same. He would walk through the hard-packed mud streets, corralled between horses, walking between hot flanks in his thick shining uniform, and feel himself drenched in sweat and dread.
There was an itch there in him, there, in his hands, and, for the first time since arriving in Kabul, he went to his pack, and took out his notebook, a knife, and the last scrap of a pencil. Slowly, paying no attention to the others in the room, he cut away at the stump, baring the lead, and then squatted on the floor. He took the pencil in his itching hand, and began to write.
‘The Afghans,’ he wrote, ‘are a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another, and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs. No people are more incapable of managing an intrigue. I was particularly struck with their idleness; they seem to sit listlessly for the whole day, staring at each other; how they live it would be difficult to discover, yet they dress well, and are healthy and happy.’
While he wrote, the itch, the uneasy fear, seemed to pass, as he described what he was so certain of, and seemed to bring the Afghans who surrounded them, every one under the point of his pencil. Now, as he wrote, they were a nation of children, and he, describing them, felt for the moment quite safe. But as he stopped and stared at the wall, the feeling returned. ‘I imbibed a very favourable impression,’ he wrote, ‘of their national character.’
10.
Under the lighted window, five squatting men sat, their attention focused on the eldest of them, his beard thick and square and white on his brown face, like a silver spade. Sadiq, older than he could tell, was telling them a story. His stories were not princesses in gardens and wizards and magic rings, but stories of this city, stories of the past. He was telling them what their fathers had told them many times, the story of how the brave, the great Futteh Khan, great brother of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, met his end at the hands of the stinking enemy. They knew the story, had heard it a hundred times, from their fathers, their mothers, and, dozens of times, many many dozens of times, sitting just here, squatting against the wall, listening to just such a storyteller as the fierce-eyed Sadiq, rousing them to vengeance, muttering into the listening night. ‘And when the Vizier Futteh Khan returned, the treacherous Prince Kamran, chief of the stinking Suddozyes, he fell on him, and seized him, and his eyes were put out. And when he was blind and powerless he was not left to wander the deserts to beg for pity, powerless as he was, but was sliced, and cut, and yet he suffered all in silence. First the treacherous Prince Kamran demanded that he and his brothers surrender to the Persian Emperor, and the Vizier refused. And so Atta Mahmoud Khan, may his torments in hell be unending, sliced off his ear, and another the other ear, and a third his nose. And all the time they lied and said the Vizier had done them wrong. May we rise up and avenge the Vizier and all his enemies! And then his right hand and then his left, and all these torments and lies the Vizier Futteh Khan bore silently and without a sound, as the blood gushed from his face and the stumps of his arms like the fount of a river in spring, so brave was he; but when his enemies took his beard, and with their knives cut it from his face, he wept from his bleeding eyes and cried out from his tongueless mouth, to think how his pride was treated. Vengeance fall on his enemies! Vengeance in the hearts of the subjects of the Amir!’
Above, by the light of a candle which stank of tallow, and burned the walls black and smoked out the room, Burnes, oblivious, wrote on, setting down the Afghans, making sure of what they were and what he knew. For now, this would do. In the end, however, he came to examine his feelings, his sensations; and came to contemplate the particular hollow beating, between dread and excitement, which settled in the stomach at especial moments. Especial moments; standing there, in the hall of the Bala Hissar, waiting to be shown into the presence of the Amir. It was a feeling like that of standing there before a woman who waited only for him to seize her. A feeling like sitting, even, at his desk, taking up a sheaf of paper and beginning to write, to set down what he had seen. Each time the same feeling, each time, a feeling not to be argued with, or explained away. So strong it was, and it remained, that he concluded, in the end, when his life had become what it would become, that it was not, after all, what it so resembled, the awareness of the physical manifestation of sex, nor of the possibility of sex, but merely that of possibility. For him, the excitement which hollowed out his stomach and made his heart beat would always be produced not by what might happen, but what would not, despite all appearances, occur, and it was for the empty promises of chance that his heart beat, and his eyes grew big, and his stomach hollowed, and he stood, and stared at what was there to be stared at. Just that. And, each day, before he began to write, the proverb of the poet came to mind, the proverb carved deep on the tomb of the Emperor Babur, and he spoke it to himself, in his sincere deep rumbling Persian. Drink wine in the city of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping; for Kabul is a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert.
THREE (#ulink_05b1b881-5c39-5569-9a9a-629bb5c3ff0d)
1.
LONDON, IN MAY.
At any other place in the world, late May would customarily be termed spring, and call forth the songs of birds, and the gambolling of infant mammals, and their attendant poets to sing their praises in the approved manner. Here, in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, there are no birds, or only ones so very brown and grey and drooping it is as if their native colours are all washed out with the incessant rinsing which falls from the London skies, birds which make no noise but an occasional croak to clear their throats of dirt. There are no lambs for the poets to celebrate, but only the usual London dogs, lying, their limbs curled up, at every street corner, too dejected to do anything but raise their heads in mild supplication at every passing boy’s kick, too far gone in hopelessness to make any noise but a quiet moan, like the wind in a loose pane. You may be sure that the month makes no difference to them, or only in that the earth they find themselves licking ceaselessly off their pelts is dry like dust, or wet like mud. There are poets, it is true, here in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, and they write, it is true, about spring and lambs and birds. But to do so, I suppose, they are obliged to shut their eyes against the city they live in, and make something up.
London knows no seasons; knows nothing of spring or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which London is proud to call a street, no one pretends any longer to know. Anything dropped in the street is instantly swallowed by London and its mud, and is never seen again; a prayer-book, a ring, a hammer, a cloak; all fall to the ground and are forever lost, deep in the mud and slime and filth of the London street. Once a poor musician let his bassoon fall, not far from Seven Dials; the mud deprived him of his livelihood, and the family, tragically bassoonless, now must beg for their merest sufficiencies, there, outside Mrs Lirriper’s drapery shop. Once, as mothers tell their naughtier sons, a small boy let go of his mother’s hand while crossing the great swamp of Piccadilly, and, untethered, sank to the bottom of the mud, never to be seen again. Soon, it is to be hoped, the weather will improve, and Mud be succeeded by Dust, though it seems unlikely that any poet will want to sing the praises of that modern season. When that happens, everything changes; the sounds of the city alter from the obscene sucking and splash and brown drain-gurgle of one half the year, to the dry crackle and quiet thudding of the other half. Those who cannot leave the city will start to complain, not of the wet and chill ceaselessly rising around their ankles, but the dry choking heat which gets into the throat, and strangles the Londoner all day and all night.
But if it is true that London knows no seasons, that, perhaps, is because it knows only one Season. It is here, in May, that we find ourselves; here, standing with the linkboys and the cutpurses and the crossing-sweepers, each unpromising youth with the tools of his unpromising trade, standing and gawping at the slow procession unfurling before them, at this hour of early dusk in late spring. It is the height of the Season, and also, nearly, the end of it – a paradox more often stated than relished. The linkboys and cutpurses and crossing-sweepers stand just where Piccadilly turns into Park Lane, and watch the procession before them, silently or raucously calling out, according to their temperament. Up Piccadilly comes a succession of carriages, each a closed black box on wheels, shiny and locked, drawn, mostly, by two black horses, for all the world as if the cashboxes of Threadneedle Street had, with one voice, cried, ‘Enough of the City!’ and, equipped each with a pair of plate-faced footmen and a set of wheels, set off to see if what they had always heard of the West End and its Court could possibly be the case. Up Piccadilly come the melancholy cashboxes, and, at the corner, you can see, as they turn, the whinnying wheels and hooves pulling free of the mud, that each, too, contains a treasure.
The linkboys cry out, with ridicule or amazement, at what they see. At this corner, the inhabitants of each carriage lean forward, and look out. Because here, you see, at this corner, lives the Duke, the old victor of Waterloo, and everyone is curious about the Duke’s habits, and will, on passing from Piccadilly into the Park, lean forward in the hope of a brief glimpse of the great man. It is a hope which is often gratified; the Duke is a man who likes to show himself, and strolls, daily, in the Park to accept the homage of strangers. But tonight, there is nothing to be seen. If the inhabitants of the carriages sink back with a minor disappointment, their evenings indefinably clouded now in some way, we have not been disappointed; because now, with the linkboys and the cutpurses, we have caught a marvellous glimpse of a lady or two. Out of the funereal darkness of the inside of a carriage, for all the world like the glitter of a black cashbox being flung open, a glistening white face appears, bathed and almost certainly scented, a white face which allows you to dream of the white flesh, the dream of white lace and silk almost certainly hidden underneath the dark cloak, and, most marvellous of all – something which forces even the wiser cynics of the observing mob into an awed silence – the unmistakable deep glitter of diamonds, brought from the far East for no reason but to decorate these cool, lovely, clean faces. Everywhere else in the city – everywhere else in the great world, as far as the linkboys know – is mud and filth, and these white faces with their bright white light of diamonds shine like unaccustomed, unimaginable virtue.
They flash in the gaze of the street observers for one second, these costly faces, and then move on in their stately way. Where are they all going, all in the same direction? Why, they are going out, naturally, because this is the Season, and in the Season it does not do, if you are of a certain level in society, to stay at home. It is required of you to put on your least comfortable clothes, ones fitted neither for a London cold nor a London heat, and go and sit for a few hours with people you know nothing of and care nothing for, drawing what satisfaction you may from the fact that when you leave to go home, outside there may be poor people who may be prepared to gawp, who, you hope, are eaten up with envy of you; because if no one in London envies you in your party-going plight, it is hard to see why you should continue the exercise.
2.
The carriage now rounding the corner extracts itself with such unpredictable lurchings from the mud beneath the wheels that the cockaded footman on top almost drops his reins. Inside, a startled face lunges towards the window, to the rich appreciation of the street onlookers; they like a nice-looking girl. The nice-looking girl smooths her dress, braces herself as if with cold, and draws back into her seat. By her is an old man, his skin so taut and leathery, his eyes so yellow and unobserving, and the whole effect so quickly angular as he sits there in the clothes for his immaculate evening that you almost expect a forked tongue to dart out, to catch a fly or two. His blood is cold, his movements quick and stiff. He is not in the first flush of fashion, nor of youth; his clothes, though immaculate, have a distinct first-gentleman-of-Europe air, as if remembering on his behalf what he has now forgotten, his high season, so long ago. The fashion of thirty years before, too, accounts for his air; not inattentive, exactly, but strongly attentive to something not in the carriage, something Bella cannot see and does not wish to share. The ruby witch, she once heard him call it; the opium he has been taking, daily, for decades. In recent years, noticing, perhaps, that the young did not care for it and often disapproved of it, he has stopped mentioning it with his customary glee, even to what remains of his family. Bella would not mention it, but has grown used to the idea that when her father hands her into the carriage on their evening round, his touch will not be firm, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere beyond her. The jerk of the carriage into or out of the mud jolted him into seeing; now his eyes are glazing over again, into their customary blank bliss. His daughter looks at him; she knows the expression very well, and blushes for him.
‘I see the Duke is still in town,’ she says.
‘The Duke would never leave town before – before—’ her father says, as his look moves back inside the carriage. ‘I remember, once, many years ago, before you were born or not long after. In the Park we were, and I greeted the Duke. Old acquaintances we were, and he stopped and pinched y’brother’s cheek. “Fine child, that, Colonel,” he said. And Harry took one look at him, with his great beak and his great ramrod shoulders and started to howl. Never saw the Duke again, not to speak to.’
‘Poor Harry,’ Bella Garraway murmurs. Her father has been galvanized by his own anecdote, which Bella has heard many times before; everyone in London has one story about the Duke of Wellington, and – Bella sometimes thinks – each is told and retold until every story has been heard by every man, woman and child in London, and then they die, stories melting into silence, and oblivion. Her father’s story always moves her, strangely, even though it hardly amounts to a story, so ruefully does it reflect on poor Harry and his hopes. She has no response for his story, but it hardly matters, because now Colonel Garraway is sinking back into his sharp-elbowed opiate haze.
The line of wheeled cashboxes moves on, stately as an oriental caravan through the trackless wastes of Piccadilly and Park Lane, all with one end, it seems, in view. At this time of the year, at this time of the afternoon, it is always thus; the upper few thousand, scrubbed and whited like so many peripatetic sepulchres, squeeze themselves into their least comfortable clothes, and set off for the evening’s entertainment. To dinner, to a rout, to a dance, to the opera; the upper few thousand, encased in whatever it has been decreed they should wear, limber stiffly through their doors, and into their carriages, to set off to see whatever people they have been seeing every week, all through the Season. Stiffened by their unyielding but undeniably fashionable raiment, you would recognize a member of the upper few thousand even unclad, fresh from the bath, or at the loose-robed gates of heaven; their gait is jointed and unnatural as a puppet’s is, and an old dowager walks as smartly as an upright old soldier. You would recognize them naked, but they are held up by their clothes and, stripped of their acquired carapace, they would surely fall, bonelessly, to the ground. As they manoeuvre their much corseted old bodies in or out of the carriage, it is difficult not to fancy that they creak in the exercise. But fashion dictates the stiff brocades and tight corseting, and fashion, here and now, is obeyed as promptly as an admiral.
Of course, everyone who now is making their slow path up Park Lane knows everything that is to be known of their fellow pilgrims. They are a very few, few thousand, and only rarely do they admit a new postulant at the crepuscular shrines of the fashionable London evening. Rarely, and usually by virtue merely of being born, is a new member of Society admitted. Money may admit you as a curiosity; or genius, particularly if displayed by a foreigner about whose origins it is possible to be rather vague, such as that excitingly-coiffeured Signor Paganini who was everywhere with his recitals two years ago. Adventure, too, or heroism committed by a suitably handsome young man in the East may serve very well to supply the fashionable two-legged curiosity of the Season. A young man with a good tale to tell, possessed of the fortune which accrues so readily in India and the deserts which lie beyond the Bosphorus, may be admitted to have a splendid Season, listened to by every ear from Park to Park, and carry into the country at the end the memory of adoring listening faces, turned up to his, white fans clasped by plump white hands, fluttering off like Cabbage Whites as the marvellously retold anecdote reaches its terrifying climax and the brave young man saves the little Rani from the jaws of the man-eating tiger. He may, also, carry the certainty of hundreds of new friends, many brave Seasons to come, if the hero of the day is foolish; if he is wise, however, he will pack his bags and go back to the scene of his great triumphs after one Season. Next year, as everyone knows, the great world will supply some new excitement, and the great tiger-beating hero will be cut in the Park by all his old friends, now so fascinated by a seven-foot American funambulist, a Russian poetess or eight-year-old watercolourist that his old stories start to seem very old hat indeed. He will be well advised to retire where he can, and draw what solace he can from his thousands, the vast and grateful emerald the Maharajah awarded him, the rapidly-acquired fat sensible wife.
3.
For the moment, the hero of the hour suspects none of this. Burnes is dressing, in as leisurely a fashion as he can manage. Here, in the dressing room of the house he has taken for the Season, he would not think that his time in the stage lights is drawing to a close. If he thinks anything, he probably considers that he is entering on the first stages of a vertiginous ascent. By now, he is intimate with people he barely dared to notice a few months ago; he finds, with a regret that does him credit, that he no longer has much time for those who introduced him to all those salons, before Christmas; he finds, with a malicious pleasure which quite surprises him, that the Montrose neighbours who snubbed his father twenty years ago now queue to drop their cards in the silver filigree bowl in the hall; they, those Montrose neighbours, have been turned in his eyes into what everyone laughs at, a set of nabob Scotch with raw-skinned ambitious wives. Burnes is decent to everyone, because that is his way. He has started to be noticed by the great – by Dukes – by Royalty, even, once; and, surely, the time will come when the brief notice, the honour graciously conferred in crowded rooms, turns into intimacy, and he finds himself a welcome visitor at every house in town. Perhaps not this year, because the Season is drawing to its brilliant close; but next year. Yes, perhaps next year.
His fingers have slowed, stopped. He stretches out his hand, and Charles hands him the next item in the ritual, in silent deference. For one moment, as he ties the elaborate knot, it occurs to him that he and his valet must be the same age. He looks, critically, in the glass at the final result. He has dined out twenty-one times already this month, and told his story twenty-one times. He looks, critically, at himself in the glass and prepares to go out, to tell it once more. What he sees in the glass is what you expect to see, of the hero of the minute, or more or less so. Not so brown as he was, not so thin as he was. He has been taken in from the heat and dust and wind, and left to pale and fatten on an unaccustomed diet; a diet of drawing rooms, and lobsters and champagne; of morning walks in the Park with no exercise more strenuous than the three-inch raising of the hat; of the ceaseless attentions of the most accomplished young ladies the metropolis can supply wholesale. That the accomplishments of the young ladies run no further than the performance of half a dozen Irish airs on harp or pianoforte hardly troubles Burnes. If he wants other, bolder accomplishments than the ones fashionable London permits of its women, he knows by now where to find them. Under the softening regime, he is quite altered from the man of six months ago; no longer dark and lined and meatless as a piece of old leather that has lain out in the tropical sun for years on end, but pale and soft. He looks at his own veal-face, there in the glass. Only his hard hands betray the fact that he has led quite a different life from his eager listeners; only the bright light in his dark eyes shows that he has seen things they will never see, or wish to.
Charles pauses in his ministrations, looks inquiringly at Burnes in the glass. Burnes becomes aware that the valet said something.
‘Yes, Charles?’ he says.
‘My lady Woodcourt’s, sir?’ Charles repeats.
‘Yes,’ Burnes says. ‘Yes, alas.’
