That’s a sextant.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said as the underlings turned the object upside down, trying to force a noise from it. ‘And what is it?’
‘It is called a sextant in my language,’ Burnes said. ‘A sort of talisman.’
‘Good, good,’ the customs officer said. ‘In my country we have many sextants.’
It was a long afternoon, but eventually the possessions had all been examined and packed up again. Nothing seemed to excite their interest except Gerard’s bottles of medicine, which they passed around, sniffing at; the maps did not seem to trouble anyone. In the end, Burnes paid the official an enormous bribe in rupees, and gave him a little looking glass.
‘I think he was rather disappointed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘He was probably hoping for more guns or a thrilling sort of dagger, I expect. They are said in my country to be frightfully fond of weaponry, these Afghan fellows.’
Gerard gave a snort, with which Burnes silently concurred. Mohan Lal had long ago started to seem a tedious companion, with his incessant calm explanations of why things had gone wrong.
They had been led to a house. The owner of the house had welcomed them as if they were guests, effusively, ordered them to be given food and drink, and showed them their beds. Were they prisoners? Were they guests? The interminable attentions of the Newab Jubbur Khan, the owner of the house, and of the series of small boys who sat in the corner of the room with muskets seemed to point to different conclusions. They had arrived ten days ago, and seemed no nearer achieving what they were here to do.
What they were was quite a simple matter: two British officers and a native guide. What they were doing there, not even Burnes would, for this moment, quite bring into his mind. If the knowledge was not at the front of his thoughts, even the calmly interrogative brown gaze of his guards would not bring it out. What Kabul was – what Afghanistan was, here at this moment, far from India, further from England in some sense other than yards and feet than even an explorer like Burnes could quite comprehend – was a matter which could not be thought of as simple. There was, too, the question of what an Englishman was doing in Asia. That had been a question which, in this sort of situation, Burnes had had ample time to contemplate, and never managed any kind of answer. He began to be nervous, sitting here; any Englishman grows atavistically restless if he finds himself more than a hundred miles from the nearest sea, and Burnes was somehow aware all the time that this high brown stinking city was a great deal more than a hundred miles from any imaginable sea.
3.
‘Now, the Lord,’ Burnes went on. ‘No, sorry, vocative, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days. I always forget Persian numbers over fifty or so.’
‘It is not particularly complicated,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling in his infuriating way. ‘Numbers in Arabic are far more complex a proposition. And we may find we have plenty of time to perfect the address to the Amir.’
‘I’m sure,’ Gerard said. ‘Years, probably. Hi, you, sir.’
The guard in the corner of the room moved, minimally.
‘Are we to see the Amir today?’ Gerard said, as he had asked ten times a day since they had arrived.
The guard made a head-tipping gesture; whether it meant something, or whether it was just the weight of the boy’s enormous, mushroom-coloured turban, was not clear.
‘In any case,’ Gerard said, ‘he knows we are here. Probably.’
The boy guard, his loaded jezail like a bayonet between his thin dirty hands, considered this, deeply, and then made the same head-tipping gesture. ‘Rus?’ he said in the end, nodding three times at the three Europeans. They appeared to know very well what Mohan Lal was.
‘No,’ Burnes said patiently, not for the first time. ‘No, we are not Russians. We are from England, from Engelstan.’
‘Yes,’ Gerard cut in. ‘Tell the Newab Jubbur Khan to tell the Amir. Go on, go and tell your commanding officer. He will see us then, when he knows where we come from.’
The boy looked, as if deeply wounded, appealing to Burnes. ‘Rus,’ he said once more, and then, for no reason on earth, started to laugh uproariously. He did not get up.
‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ Gerard said irritably. ‘Laugh like that, I mean. It makes me think they know something we don’t know. And why do they keep calling us Russians?’
‘Rus,’ the boy said again, murmuring as if entranced, understanding a word in what Gerard said.
‘No, no, not Rus,’ Gerard said. ‘And when do we hear from the damned Emperor of the damned Afghans? Oh, God – oh, God – that damned mutton at breakfast. Gentlemen, excuse me—’
Burnes shrugged, as Gerard rushed from the room, clutching his stomach chaotically like an unfastened valise. He prided himself on the value of patience in these dealings. That was the great thing in the East; patience, because nothing ever happened when it should, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything, in dealing with the great rulers of the East, was whim and delay. Ten days was nothing; because, in response to whim and delay, there was no sensible behaviour to adopt but a complete, more-than-Oriental patience. That was what everyone said, and Burnes was pleased with himself for having exercised a great deal of patience with every potentate he had ever come across, and usually attained, if not the desired end, then, at least, some interesting conclusion. What no one had ever warned him about was the necessity to exercise some patience with one’s fellow travellers; with a supercilious ass like Mohan Lal, forever making superior suggestions about one’s Persian or giving one ridiculous and probably entirely false information about the curious customs of the country, or a bigger ass like Gerard, complaining about the slightest inconvenience to his blessed dignity, arguing for two entire days about the necessity of shaving his head and dying his beard black before crossing the Indus, always wanting to tell some outraged and heavily-armed nabob about the greatness of the Empire, or even, once, telling an imam in response to the invariable question about the European diet that, yes, he ate bacon daily and very delicious it was too. Unfairly, Burnes blamed Gerard even for his disastrous digestion, the steady torrential cataract from his bowels, blamed in turn on the damned mutton at breakfast, the damned beans at dinner, or the damned melon which the rest of the company had eaten at Jalalabad with no ill effects. Yes, the exercise of patience with one’s damned fellow travellers was the most taxing thing; compared to that, waiting ten days to see the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan presented him with no difficulty whatever.
4.
Out on the street, debate about the Europeans who rode so badly was furious and incessant, like the noise of a cloud of swallows.
‘The Amir will not see them.’
‘The Amir will see them tomorrow, fool. He has seen them yesterday, and knows everything about them.’
‘How can the Amir have seen them when they have not seen the Amir?’
At the edges of the market, the old men jogged up and down on their heels, agitated by debate, and punched at the air, quick as clockwork. They bothered no one.
‘The Amir sent Akbar the son of the Amir, and the Amir saw them with the eyes of Akbar.’
