what half a century of care had built up. The great bungalows with walls feet thick were collapsing room by room, the wire gauze fly nettings over the windows were torn and the five-year-old bath water stagnant in the bathrooms. In the living rooms were great Russian stoves, standing ceiling high, black and banded like cannon set in the walls, warming two rooms at once, needing whole forests of wood to keep them going.
The Consulate building itself was lost and forgotten; arcades of Corinthian columns supported an upper balcony, itself collapsing. The house was shaded by great trees, planted perhaps a century ago, now at their most magnificent. Behind barred windows were the big green safes with combination locks in the confidential registry. I asked Hugh how they got them there.
‘In the days of the Raj you could do anything.’
‘But they must weigh tons. There’s no railway.’
‘If Curzon had anything to do with it, they were probably dragged overland from India.’
On the wall in one of the offices we found a map of Central Asia. It was heavily marked in coloured pencil. One such annotation well inside Russian Territory, beyond a straggling river, on some sand dunes in the Kara-Kum desert read, ‘Captain X, July, ‘84’ and was followed by a cryptic question mark.
‘The Great Game,’ said Hugh. It was a sad moment for him, born nearly a century too late to participate in the struggle that had taken place between the two great powers in the no-man’s-land between the frontiers of Asiatic Russia and British India.
Apart from Hugh and myself, everyone inside the Consulate firmly believed that the British would return. In the morning when we met the old man from Khurasan who had been in the Guides Cavalry, the younger one who had been in a regiment of Punjabis and the old, old man who was the caretaker’s cook, I felt sad under their interrogation about my health and regiment. To them it was as though the Indian Army as they had known it still existed.
‘Apka misaj kaisa hai, Sahib?’
‘Bilkul tik hai.’
‘Apka paltan kya hai?’
I had acquired Urdu rapidly sixteen years before. It had vanished as quickly as it came. Soon I dried up completely and was left mouthing affirmatives. ‘Han, han.’
‘For God’s sake don’t keep on saying, “Han, han”. They’ll think you’re crazy.’
‘I’ve said everything I can remember. What do you want me to say. That we’re not coming back, ever?’1
With all the various delights of Meshed to sample it was late when we set off. Driving in clouds of dust and darkness beyond the outer suburbs the self-starter began to smoke. Grovelling under the vehicle among the ants and young scorpions, fearful of losing our feet when the great American lorries roared past, we attained the feeling of comradeship that only comes in moments of adversity.
The starter motor was held in place by two inaccessible screws that must have been tightened by a giant. It was a masterpiece of British engineering. With the ants marching and counter-marching over me, I held a guttering candle while Hugh groped with the tinny spanner that was part of the manufacturers’ ‘tool-kit’.
‘What does the book say?’
It was difficult to read it with my nose jammed into the earth.
‘The starter is pre-packed with grease and requires no maintenance during the life of the vehicle.’
‘That’s the part about lubrication but how do you GET IT OFF?’
It was like trying to read a first folio in a crowded train. I knocked over the candle and for a time we were in complete darkness.
‘It says: “Loosen the retaining screws and slide it.”’
‘There must be a place in hell for the man who wrote that.’
‘Perhaps you have to take the engine out first.’
Late at night we returned unsuccessful to the city and in the Shāri Tehran, the Warren Street of Meshed, devoted to the motor business, hammered on the wooden doors of what until recently had been a caravanserai, until the night watchman came with stave and lantern and admitted us.
In the great court, surrounded by broken-down droshkies and the skeletons of German motor-buses, we spread our sleeping-bags on the oily ground beside our vehicle. For the first time since leaving Istanbul we had achieved Hugh’s ambition to sleep ‘under the stars’.
Early the next morning the work was put in hand at a workshop which backed on to the courtyard. It was the sort of place where engines are dismembered and never put together again. The walls of the shop were covered with the trophies of failure, which, together with the vast, inanimate skeletons outside, gave me the same curious feelings of fascination and horror that I still experience in that part of the Natural History Museum devoted to prehistoric monsters.
The proprietor Abdul, a broken-toothed demon of a man, conceived a violent passion for Hugh. We sat with him drinking coffee inside one of the skeletons while his assistant, a midget ten-year-old, set to work on the starter with a spanner as big as himself, shaming us by the ease with which he removed it.
‘Arrrh, CAHARLESS, soul of your father. You have ill-used your motor-car.’ He hit Hugh a violent blow of affection in the small of the back, just as he was drinking his coffee.
‘Urggh!’
‘What do you say, O CAHARLESS?’
Hugh was mopping thick black coffee from his last pair of clean trousers.
‘I say nothing.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘How should I know.’
‘You are angry with me. Let us go to my workshop and I shall make you happy.’
He led us into the shop. There he left us. In a few minutes he returned with a small blind boy, good-looking but with an air of corruption. Abdul threw down his spanner with a clang and began to fondle him.
‘CAHARLESS!’ he roared, beckoning Hugh.
‘NO!’
Presently Abdul pressed the boy into a cupboard and shut the door. There followed a succession of nasty stifled noises that drove us out of the shop.
Later, when we returned, Hugh was given a tremendous welcome.
‘CAHARLESS, I thought you were departed for ever. You have come back!’
‘You still have my motor-car.’
To me he was less demonstrative but also less polite, snatching my pipe from my mouth and clenching it between his awful broken teeth in parody of an Englishman.
‘CAHARLESS, when you take me to Englestan I shall smoke the pipe.’
All through the hot afternoon he worked like a demon with his midget assistant, every few minutes beseeching Hugh to take him to England. After two hours the
