In Xanadu (36 page)

A bewildering hierarchy serves to create employment for this household. If the Begum Quizilbash wishes to buy a chicken from the bazaar a complicated ritual is enacted. She must first summon the bearer who will take the order. The bearer will send the cook's boy to the secretary who will give him the appropriate number of rupees. The cook's boy will then approach the sweeper who will approach the
mali
who will be sent off to the bazaar to negotiate the purchase with his cousin who keeps the bazaar hen-coop. At this stage the Begum might remember that she has guests and will tell the bearer that she wants not one but three chickens. The cook's boy will be sent for again. He will re-approach the secretary and then find the sweeper who will find the
mali's
boy and send him off after the
mali.
Finally the Begum will remember that the Indian Ambassador is a vegetarian, the previous two orders will be countermanded, and the
mali's
other boy will be sent to fetch back his colleagues while the
chowkidar
will go off and buy some
dal,
rice and potatoes.

Such pampering is fast softening any resolve to continue the journey. The day of departure has already been put off twice. Lahore is one of the most beautiful towns I have seen: if it were not teetotal I would see very little reason ever to leave it.

Yet amid all this luxury I am like a spoilt child who has lost his nanny. Laura left yesterday, on the midday flight to Delhi. Having travelled overland this far, she discovered that the Indian border was closed because of a Sikh uprising in the Punjab. Her first impulse was to attempt to cross illegally with the camel-trading nomads who live in the desert between Baluchistan and Rajasthan. We eventually dissuaded her from this, and instead Mozaffar took her to the Pakistan Airlines office to buy a ticket home to Delhi. On being told that all the places were booked she displayed a last flash of the spirit that got us this far, safe, and two days ahead of schedule. According to Mozaffar she assaulted the unfortunate airline official threatening him with a diplomatic incident and telling him to pull his socks up. She was off at noon the following day, welcomed onto the plane by a delegation of Pakistani officials. They seemed to be under the impression that she was a member of the Royal Family.

When travelling with her I could never decide whether she reminded me more of Boadicea or Joyce Grenfell, but now she has gone I find that I am already missing her. It was she who propelled me this far, and now I do not know what are the chances of reaching Peking without her. Louisa, my companion for the rest of the journey, flew in two nights ago, dressed as if for the King's Road.

She is much easier company, but is made of different, slighter stuff. She is beautiful, delicate and fragrant. In the mornings she sleeps late (now, though it is nearly noon, she is still slumbering) and when awake she moons around only semi-conscious of the Begum and her household. The reason, I fear, is that she is in love - and not with me. Those days are gone for ever. Her new boyfriend is Edward, and he has already been sent two ten-page letters; (I cannot remember ever receiving more than three pages).

But there are other more serious problems facing the expedition. We simply do not have the necessary permits either to go up the Karakoram Highway or to cross into China over the Kunjerab Pass. The Pakistani Embassy in London told us that the former document could be ; arranged, with difficulty, but according to the Chinese Tourist Service ('service' here being a poetic euphemism) the latter permit is almost unobtainable: it can only be authorized by Peking, takes at least six months to arrange, and then is generally granted only to groups of octogenarian Americans.

All, however, is not lost. Before we left Britain Laura wrote to enlist the aid of the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. I have the reply in front of me. It is written on a piece of thick, heavily embossed paper with a lion and unicorn at the top right-hand corner. From it, it would appear that the Permanent Under-Secretary is a personal friend of Laura's. It also appears that the embassy in Peking has been instructed to contact the Chinese Foreign Ministry to arrange an express permit, and that the embassy in Islamabad is waiting to help us with the Pakistani Civil Service. Of all the wonders I have seen Laura work over the past few weeks this must be the most spectacular. I have one other letter in front of me. This I organized (although acting on Laura's instructions). This second letter is written on paper so thick it almost approaches parchment and bears the great crest of Trinity

College, Cambridge. If it is to be believed any obstacle to our expedition could well prove a major blow to the study of the Orient as we know it:

To whom it may concern:

This letter introduces William Hamilton-Dalrymple, a scholar of Trinity College Cambridge who has been researching the journey of Marco Polo and the conditions of China at the time of Kubla Khan. Currently he is completing his research by following Marco Polo's journey to Peking.

Mr Hamilton-Dalrymple's expedition was carefully scrutinized by a committee of academics at Trinity, and he was given a large grant by the college to undertake it. As a representative of that college I am happy to vouch for the academic objectives of the expedition and for the personal qualities of its members. The expedition's results will issue in work which we much hope will considerably enlarge the knowledge of the history and culture of the People's Republic of China in both Cambridge and England as a whole.

I hope that Mr Hamilton-Dalrymple will be granted such permissions as he may require to continue and complete his remarkable and important journey. On behalf of Cambridge University, I should like to express gratitude for whatever assistance you may be able to afford the expedition.

Simon Keynes

(Dr Simon Keynes MA PhD, FSA, FRHS Fellow of Trinity College, University Lecturer.)

And this, God bless his soul, from a man who received five essays from me in an entire academic year, and they on the Anglo-Saxons. The Begum Quizilbash in her capacity as Minister of Health, Special Education and Social Services, is also contributing a letter to my collection. She promises that it will outline how any obstacle to the expedition could well endanger the Pakistani Health Programme. The trouble is that the Chinese cannot possibly be taken in by this nonsense. Reading these letters they will expect a one-hundred-man team of wizened professors, veteran Sinologists and a whole United Nations health delegation. They certainly won't believe it when Lou and I mm up at the Islamabad Chinese Embassy in our rags, without a single word of the Chinese language and only the most superficial grasp of Chinese history. They might even rescind our visas.

The Begum has just swept in and announced that lunch will be ready in quarter of an hour. I had better wake Lou.

When I think back to that time in Lahore, in my mind's eye I always see the town at twilight. It is the best time of day. The great Indian sun hangs over the domes and the
chattri,
and it is then that you notice the smells: the sweet, heavy scent of dung fires, a whiff of monsoon-wet casuarina, the odour of sweating coolies. In the bazaars the barbers are shaving the businessmen and the
derzi
are bent over their sewing machines. There are garish film hoardings at the corners and beneath them there are men selling samosas and men selling fruit. There are quacks and cobblers and women in black calico cowls. There are children, everywhere and all about, flying kites and playing cricket, scuttling after the bullock carts and chasing the pi-dogs. Most evenings we would wander through these bazaars, or perhaps visit the Shalimar gardens. I would sit and write my logbook while Mozaffar would tell us the names of the trees: the eucalyptus, the banyans, the deodar and the mulberries. Lou would sketch.

But the place that interested me most was at the far end of the Anarkali bazaar, beyond the madness of rickshaws and the terrible, crashing traffic. The Ravi flowed there, and on its banks, within a walled garden, there stood the tomb of the Mogul Emperor Jehangir, the World Seizer. It interested me not because it was a particularly fine tomb {although it was) nor because Jehangir was a particularly important emperor. My interest derived from the works of one of my travel-writing heroes, Tom Coryat. The 'Odcombian legge-stretcher' as he liked to be known, was a buffoon, a figure of fun at the court of James I. He was renowned for an 'irrepressible loquacity' and according to one contemporary 'he carried folly in his very face'. But he was an astounding traveller, and he is the first Englishman known to have visited Asia purely for pleasure. 'I have an insatiable greedinesse of seeing strange countries,' he wrote, 'which exercise is indeed the queene of all pleasures in the world.'

Coryat discovered his love of travelling during a quick trip around Europe in 1608 which he wrote up in
'Coryat's Crudities. Ha stilly gobbled up in Five Monet his Travells.... Newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome'.
Despite its title the book was a bestseller, and was celebrated for its revelations into the many strange sights of the continent (including a famous passage on the ostrich at Fontainebleau: 'it is a very foolish bird: for whereas hee doth sometimes hide his necke behind a bush, he thinks that nobody sees him, though indeede he be seene of every one'). Having published a supplement to his
Crudities (Coryat's Crambe Now Served as a Second Course to his Crudities),
Coryat set off with the intention of walking overland to the court of the Great Mogul and there riding upon an elephant. He 'traced all this tedious way afoote with no small toyle of body and discomfort', living 'competentlie for a penny sterling a day'. He crossed the Indus ('as broade againe as our Thames at London') and finally entered the dominions of the Great Mogul sometime in the spring of 1
6
1
3.
His reward was a view of Lahore in its Golden Age. 'It is one of the largest cities of the whole universe,' he wrote, 'for it containeth at least XVI miles in compasse and exceedeth even Constantinople in greatnesse.' Agra he thought 'in every way inferior'.

For all his buffoonery Coryat was a perceptive observer, and it i; his mix of humour and accurate detail that makes his account so riveting. His description of Jehangir is typical:

This present prince is a verie worthy person. Hee is of complexion neither white nor black, but of a middle betwixt them.... He is of seemlie composition of bodie, of stature little unequal to mine, but much more corpulent than myselfe ... it is said that he is uncircumcised, wherein he differeth from all the Mohometan princes that ever were in the world.

On his 'exoticke wanderings' Coryat picked up Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hindu, and it was his skills as a linguist that enabled him to include the spicy details of bazaar gossip that enliven his picture of Mogul India. It brings the Emperor and his court far more vividly to life than any of the formal histories which have survived:

One day in the yeere, for the solace of the King's women, all the trades-men's wives enter the Mahal with some-what to sell, in the manner of a faire. The King is broker for his women and with his gaines that night he makes his supper, no man being present. Now observe that whatsoever is brought in of virill shape, as instance is reddishes, so great is the jelousie, and so frequent the wickednesse of this people, that they are cut and jagged for feare of converting the same to some unnaturall abuse. By this meanes hee attaines to the sight of all the prettie wenches of the towne. At such a kind of faire he got his beloved Normahal.