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TWO
1.

‘EMPEROR OF THE AFGHANS,’ Burnes chanted, ‘Lord of the most distant horizon, King of the far hills, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind of a Hundred, of a Hundred, of a Hundred—’

He opened his eyes, and made a deflating noise. ‘Ppphhhhhwah,’ he said. ‘I always get stuck there.’

Outside, in the courtyard, a fight was breaking out between a gang of boys; the sudden close yelling was like a flock of geese, diving over the roofs of the mud-brick house. Burnes knocked his fist against his forehead, as if pretending to think. Dr Gerard got up from the corner of the room where he had been squatting, awkward as a camel, and went to the shutters to see what, if anything, the fight outside was about.

‘Very good,’ Mohan Lal said smoothly. ‘Your Persian is really excellent, if I may say so.’

There was an embarrassed sort of silence, since Mohan Lal, naturally, ought not to say so. Certainly, it was not for him to tell Burnes whether his Persian was good or not. Still, he seemed to take it upon himself not just to compliment his betters, but, on occasion, to correct them. Anywhere else, of course – but this was not anywhere else, and, knowing that all of them had to rely on Mohan Lal’s goodwill, the party had taken a tacit decision to put up with the guide’s elegant superiority, perpetually bordering on the supercilious.

‘What is it, anyway?’ Burnes said finally. ‘I can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

‘Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ Mohan Lal said, smiling faintly, as if giving a child the answer to a terribly obvious Christmas puzzle. ‘An interesting title. The Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days is a summer wind, a phenomenon fascinating in the abstract, although not something one would wish to experience. It is regarded as a unique property of the kingdom, and therefore an appropriate title for the Amir.’

‘Not something I’d want to boast about,’ Dr Gerard said, turning back to the room, disappointed in the small drama of the courtyard outside. ‘And I hope we’re not here long enough to have to put up with it.’

‘If he keeps us waiting here long enough,’ Burnes said, ‘we may simply have to grit our teeth and endure.’

Outside, Kabul continued its usual life.

Burnes found it hard to be quite sure whether, here, they were prisoners or not. Ten days before, they had arrived at the gates of the city – or what passed for the gates, a waist-high mud wall full of holes. An inadequate rampart, one might have thought, but the Afghans came and went quite happily, as if never fearing an enemy, giving no thought to invaders or infidel. Until now, Burnes had remained swathed in his cloth, blanketed up, his face browned first by colouring and after by the weeks trekking in the mountain sun, his blue eyes becoming more startling by the day. Arriving at Kabul, however, it seemed wise to admit to what they were immediately, and take their chances.

Kabul had surprised Burnes. He had read what there was to read about the country, looked with every appearance of care at the drawings, the prints of the city. They hadn’t been wrong, exactly; but still the city was not what he expected. No commentator, no artist, had captured what Burnes saw; it was as if they had seen only the outlines of the city, or rather, as if they, like Burnes, had seen it whole, and only cared to convey the city in part. Burnes tried to think of what it was his guides had left out. He could only think of it in two words: the fragrance; the filth.

In other cities, the fruit-and-flower smell of the street, the stench of the shit, human, canine, equine and more, would have seemed the inessentials of the city’s life. It had seemed like that to the observers of the city whose work they had so relied upon; they had removed the fragrance and the filth from their gaze as lying above or below what substance truly mattered. Buildings, thoroughfares, population numbers could be set down, and that was what, it seemed, really counted; not the mere smells of this city. It seemed always in danger of turning into an orchard, a stable, or a vast latrine. To Burnes, on the other hand, it was the intangible but overpowering fact of smell which seemed central to the place. Sitting in this half-prison, with all the time in the world to practise the address to the Amir and pursue absurd speculations, he found himself wondering about a map of the city which would convey this sense of his. In his head was a map of Kabul which did not describe the streets and the buildings, but set down the intangible and rich sudden odours of the place; described where a whiff of horse-shit mingled with the heavy perfume of rotting mulberries, where dead dog and fruit blossom competed. He closed his eyes, and there, in his head, was a weighty flush of sensation, a wave like the colour purple, arriving in his head, foreign, uninvited, irresistible. You did not need to walk the streets to map them in this olfactory manner; you only needed to sit by the window, and wait for a breeze. He had seen nothing of the city, in truth, nothing but a few streets as they had arrived, nothing but the few buildings around the house where they now lived, when their guards occasionally escorted them out. The city came to them, its perfumes carried on the wind.

2.

They had arrived, and stood there at the wall, for a moment or two, as if their mere stance could announce their purpose. In front of them, there was the city. It was hard to think of it as a prize worth taking, now. Now that it was here in front of them, it seemed very unlike the great imperial jewel London and Calcutta so easily dreamed of. The hills and hollows of the land had been scattered, it seemed, with detritus; rambling, temporary houses, plastered smooth, scattered where they would fall. It was a city set high in the mountains, and the chill at night was fierce. Between the houses of the city paths, roads of packed-down mud ran; between them a thousand pedlars of goods set up their stalls to sell what they would. But it seemed to Burnes, as he stood there with his companions and waited for the Afghans to come and discover what he wanted, less like a city than a great wild garden. The groves of this high city joined, rambled with fruit trees, with what must be mulberries, blotting on the street and casting their high scent to the wind. What had London and Calcutta dreamed of? A city which could turn into an imperial jewel, certainly, a great imperial city, and not this random assembly, like the careless evening settlement of some wandering people.

Burnes, Mohan Lal the guide, and Gerard had dismounted. They stood there for a while, and it was not long before the curious little boys were succeeded by some more authoritative figures. Mohan Lal had stepped forward, but Burnes spoke first. They had listened to his explanation intently, had exchanged the ritual compliments calmly and gracefully, and, without consulting, had allowed them to remount, and led them into the city. A mounted group approached, shouting hoarsely, wheeled hungrily, curiously, around them like circling buzzards, and, before Burnes could start his explanation again, had ridden off.

First the customs house. The three of them had been hurried into a low white house, its door barely on its hinges. As the eager crowd of short, beakily-featured men, all shouting, poured into the garden of the house, a flock of magpies rose clattering like knives from the fruit trees. The packhorses were tied up outside, and quickly stripped of their bundles. Inside, an immensely fat man emerged with great state from a back room, chewing and wiping some grease from his mouth with the bottom of his coat. All the Afghans fell abruptly silent. He gazed at them as mournfully as a dog as their luggage was brought in and dumped on the floor.

Burnes began his explanation. May the sun ever shine, glorious empire of the Afghans, long heard rumours of the wisdom and greatness of the kingdom. All received with gracious nods; tea was called for and brought by two boys of strongly corrupt appearance. Flat sweet bread followed, politely picked at by the Europeans, wolfed by the Afghans. Burnes pressed on. He and his companions were Europeans, returning home from India overland. Long heard rumours of the beauty of Kabul and promised, etc. (A brief pause here as one of the tea boys, after setting down a glass for Burnes, tried to stroke his neck. Burnes pushed him off gently, and the nearest adult hit the boy very hard with the butt of his rifle, to everyone’s colossal amusement.) Hoped to stay in Kabul for a month, and their great dream was to meet and talk with the great and famous Emperor of the Afghans, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan.

Burnes came to the end of his speech, and the customs officer gave a brief side-to-side nod of approbation. It wasn’t quite clear what this meant; Burnes, to be sure of indicating what sort of people they were, got out his letters of introduction to the Amir, each carefully prepared in India with a grandiose seal. The official, however, showed almost no interest in them after a quick glance or two. ‘Oh God,’ Gerard said in English. ‘They’re going to search the bags.’ Burnes ignored him; there was nothing to be done about it, and the best way to stay calm was to try not to remember what on earth there was in there.

‘My books,’ Burnes said, as they extracted a dog-eared copy of Marmion and flicked through it. A sketchbook he feared might worry them more, but they looked at it cursorily, and set it down.

‘Tell me,’ the customs officer said. ‘In your country, it is said that pork is eaten. Can that be true?’

Burnes was prepared. ‘It is a food eaten only by the very poorest people in our country. I myself have never tried it, but it is said that it has the taste, somewhat, of beef. 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.’

‘Did they not know the son of the Amir when Akbar was announced?’

‘Many are the ways of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise they are.’

Futteh the singer, plump and pale as a dove, his saucy eyes wandering to make sure of his audience, finished sucking on his plum, pondered, spat. He began a story.

‘You recall the tale of the Vizier’s daughter and the son of the King,’ he started. ‘And the King did not know how he should know if the daughter of the Vizier was true and good as she was thought to be. Now, this was many, many years ago, in China. And the Vizier had the most marvellous garden of roses in all of China, and he was in the habit of taking a walk in the garden, each morning. And one morning, he was accompanied in his walk by his daughter, who was as beautiful as the first light of the dawn over the mountains. He was glad to walk in the rose garden with his daughter, and, after they had walked together for an hour, the Vizier said to his daughter: My daughter, is it true that …’

The story unravelled. Futteh was a good storyteller, and, even in the cold of the early evening, he could hold half a dozen old men with his seamless voice. Their eyes fixed on his, six pairs of eyes, whether crafty, knowing, cynical, for the moment subdued into the quiet trust of the audience. Their knees hunched, their backs against the wall, they listened to the comforting tale they had heard hundreds of times before. Occasionally they interrupted with marginal, concerned comments – ‘He does not know that the ring has been swallowed by the fish on the King’s table,’ or, ‘The girl, does she not understand that the man she is marrying is her own brother?’ or, as narrative catastrophe threatened, ‘Allah is great and merciful.’ But for the most part, they let Futteh tell the story in his own leisurely manner.

When it was over, an hour or two had passed, and the audience sighed, as if wanting more of their own satisfaction.

‘The son of the King in the story disguised himself, and went into the marketplace to hear what the common people were saying,’ one of the audience said.

‘Yes, and that is what Akbar, son of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, that is what he has done, with the Russians.’

‘They are not Russians,’ another man said, passing. ‘Engelstan.’

‘Akbar put on a tribesman’s clothes, and took a jezail,’ Futteh said, waving his hand in the air impatiently, dismissing either the objection or the flies. ‘And he went to the house where the English are, and sat with them for two hours, and talked with them. But all the time, they did not know who they were speaking with.’

‘Great is the mind of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, and wise is he in the ways of the world,’ someone murmured.

‘And they ride so badly,’ Futteh added, with great finality.

‘Like the sack of rice on the back of an old donkey,’ his listeners chorused sagely.

5.

The orchard city fell into shade as the afternoon wore on; pale peaches, espaliered against the wall, plums, apricots, pears; beneath the window of the Newab Jubbur Khan where they sat all day, a fine apple tree, just like the trees of Burnes’s childhood. He shut his eyes, and sniffed, and sometimes, through all the smell and noise and clear strange mountain air, there was all his childhood, in the sheltered Montrose garden. Walnuts, cherries, vines, and more wonderful things, pomegranates growing in the streets, and, everywhere, mulberry trees; their fruit piled up in market stalls, lying in the street, and the whole city sucking ceaselessly on fruit. At the door of their wing in the courtyard, a small boy, padded up with scraps of cloth, his legs wrapped up puttee-fashion, his dirty feet bare and hardened in sandals, was sucking on a handful of cherries and mulberries, cracking walnuts between his hard teeth, and every so often running his tongue round his mouth to clean off what juice was staining his face, leaving a fat white clown-smile in a fruit-smeared face. And everywhere the birds; bright chattering magpies, the fat burble of doves, edging at each other in their nervous fighting. Burnes watched them for hours from the window. And the nightingale; he had never known, quite, what the Persians meant when they wrote about the nightingale, but here, it was a sharp lemon tang, cutting through the rich sweetness of the dungy perfumed city, a line of pure song, returning on itself, multiplying, varying, twisting, but always, always, itself. He sat in the evening light, and listened, and found no way to ask the others to be quiet too.

The day wore on, and at some point towards the end of the afternoon, a procession of dishes began to be carried into the room. The two women of the house, veiled in brick-red cloaks, carried them in. Their veils were raw squares of cloth, dropped over their heads. A coarse lattice was cut in to allow them to see. Burnes seemed to catch the glint of an eye through the loose weave of the eye-slit, and, before he lowered his eyes, wondered for a moment if that meant the woman was looking at him. From their gait, they were both young, and the contours of their bodies were revealed by the rippling red cloth.

A third woman stood at the door and watched, holding a baby; she too was veiled; even the baby was veiled. She seemed to be supervising the other women. Perhaps a favoured wife. The dishes were set down on the floor without explanation, and, when the entire room was filled with clay dishes, the three women retreated to the door, looked once at the food, and not at the men, and quickly left. And then the Newab Jubbur Khan came in.

The Newab, whose house this was, seemed to regard them with an almost affectionate air. He made a point of eating with them; he also made a point of coming in after the food, and leaving without excusing himself. The three of them scrambled to their feet.

‘You have passed an agreeable day, I hope?’ the Newab said kindly. He was a slight man, his nose a huge beak in his little face; when he walked, it was with an evident consciousness of grandeur which his appearance did not entitle him to. He walked like a man who has once been fat. ‘If you do not object, I would like to eat with you.’

‘We would be honoured,’ Burnes said.

‘Honoured indeed,’ Gerard said, looking warily at the food. ‘Thrice honoured.’

The Newab nodded agreeably at Gerard’s meaningless formulation. ‘Sit, sit,’ he said. He rattled off the habitual prayer, lazily looking round, and without taking a breath, fell back from Arabic into Persian. ‘The lamb is particularly fine, from my own flock.’ He gestured at a greasy-looking dish, grey and shining in the sun. Burnes leant forward and scooped up some of the cold stew, knowing perfectly well that the Newab was lying politely, since all the food here had to be ordered up from the bazaar. Gerard just looked green.

‘Tell me,’ the Newab asked, after each of the dishes had been commended and accepted, and they were embarked on the task of struggling unsuccessfully with what could be eaten of the Newab’s food. ‘How large a city is London, or Calcutta?’

‘They are different cities, Newab, and both large and beautiful,’ Mohan Lal said.

‘I see,’ the Newab said. He seemed, still, to be under the impression that Calcutta and London were more or less the same place, or perhaps different names for the same city; an impression they had been trying to correct for some time now. ‘But how big? Is it, for instance, as large as our city?’

‘I think it might be even a little larger,’ Burnes said tactfully. ‘How many people, for instance, live in Kabul?’

The Newab sucked on his teeth, and gazed at the wall, as if calculating. ‘Many, many people, and their numbers grow every day, thanks to the wisdom and kindness of the Amir who rules over them.’

‘I see,’ Burnes said, making a routine half-incline of the head at the mention of the Amir.

‘London has many hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, and is the richest and most beautiful city in the world,’ Gerard cut in. Burnes looked at him in irritation; what the point of boasting to the Newab about the size of London was, he had no idea. Just an unthinking, involuntary outcrop of Gerard’s personality, as frustrating and impossible to argue with as geology.

‘Of course, we have seen very little of Kabul,’ Burnes said. ‘But the reputation of the beauty and splendour of the city has spread far, and we have travelled from India in the hope that we may see for ourselves.’

‘How is it that you have seen very little of Kabul?’ the Newab abruptly asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled, proffering a dish of boiled aubergines.

Burnes was thrown. ‘We have been resting here, at your hospitality,’ he said finally, seeing no way to point out that they were effectively prisoners. At that, as if to make his point, one of the succession of small boys with muskets wandered in. He greeted the Newab elaborately, the English more casually, and sat down in the corner of the room, promptly falling asleep, both hands on the barrel of his gun. ‘At the gracious hospitality of the Newab,’ Burnes said, pointedly. ‘We have been unable to see the famous city of Kabul.’

‘Great is the city of Kabul,’ the Newab Jubbur Khan echoed, absently. He took a piece of bread, tearing it in half, and dipped it in some dish of meat; before eating it, he made a vague gesture of invitation towards Gerard, who, with too evident unwillingness, followed his example. ‘Yes, the city is great, and its fame has spread far. The bazaar of the city is the greatest in the world, where the world comes to marvel at the riches and splendour of the empire. The merchants of China and Russia and Engelstan come to the great markets, laden with goods, and leave laden down with more than they brought, such are the marvels of the city. The beauty and splendour of the city is great, and the beauty of the people of the Emperor is famous throughout the world. And such, willing, it will always be. Over the city is the Bala Hissar, the palace of my brother, the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, where my brother rules over his family and his wives and his wealth in wisdom and mercy and goodness, willing. And the palace of my brother is famed throughout the world, and the world comes to express its wonder at its beauty and greatness and the greatness of my brother the Amir.’

He paused, perhaps considering whether his description of the city would, in the end, be as useful to the English as simply letting them out to look for themselves; perhaps, however, considering what there could possibly be to start praising next in the high stinking city. Not the food, at any rate, Burnes thought unkindly, refusing the offer of another greasy dish.

‘The Amir is your brother?’ Mohan Lal said.

‘The Amir is the brother, it is said, of every Afghan,’ Burnes said, helping out.

‘He is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said simply. ‘The shade of the same mountain shadowed our birth, and may the same stream refresh his parched tongue.’

‘May friendship be forever between warriors,’ Burnes said.

‘And he is my brother,’ Jubbur Khan said again.

‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said, conventionally echoing what Burnes had said.

‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Jubbur Khan agreed. But then he seemed troubled, and said, once more, more emphatically, ‘The Amir is my brother.’

‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said again, idiotically.

‘He is your brother?’ Burnes cut in. ‘He is the son of your father?’

‘He is the son of my father,’ Jubbur Khan said, relieved. ‘Yes, he is the son of my father.’

This explained a great deal. And now Jubbur Khan got up, as if he had said enough to explain who he was, and who the Amir was, and what the Europeans were. He got up, bowing on all sides, and swept out with massive graciousness, hardly waiting for his guests to raise themselves and bow graciously back, as if his good manners were such that no complementary response could possibly improve or complete them, and was out of the door and at the bottom of the stairs before Gerard succumbed to what had clearly been troubling him for some time, a colossal, harrumphing and malodorous fart, like a bough breaking under the sheer weight of fruit. The boy guard looked up, surprised and humorous. Burnes vastly bowed in his direction, the sleeves of his robe collapsing about his arms and hands. ‘And to you, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ he said. ‘That, I expect, is a very good sign.’

‘Indeed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘Your digestion is improving, to venture a fart. You need not have waited until the departure of the Newab, indeed. I have read that the Afghan custom is to fart at table.’

‘A risky business,’ Gerard said. ‘With nothing to eat but this damned greasy food.’

6.

Outside, there was a flicker of movement. A scarlet-leaved tree against the dense dusk sky trembled suddenly; a gust, quickly over, as if someone had shaken the tree’s trunk and run away. Another movement, something which might have been a bird, shooting up from the tree with a raucous squawk, abruptly muted. Gerard raised himself from where he lay, complete with food and boredom, and went to the window, where Burnes was already standing. Underneath the tree, a flash, sudden, of white, like the wink of a fish belly, turning in a black pool. For a moment the faces of the Afghans had turned up to the window, before returning to their usual occupation; their teeth and eyes winking white in the dusk. They could be guards; yes, they could be; or, conceivably, they could merely be sitting there, as they would sit there indifferently, whoever was inside the house of the Newab. Burnes did not know, and could not think who to ask.

Out in the court, the squatting boys were preparing for their street-sport. There were five of them, and each clutched, underneath his arm, something which peeped and squawked, a weak piping squawk like an unoiled hinge. With his free hand, each dipped steadily into a little bag, tied to the sash at his waist next to the knife, and ate shrivelled-up little apricots, crunching and spitting the stones with all the absorption they had. In a moment, a boy threw down the piping bird under his arm, and, as if recognizing the challenge, the boy facing him in the circle threw down his bird, too. The two quails shivered their plumage back into plumpness, and nervously strutted in the other’s direction. The boys made an encouraging noise, a quick strange grunting rattle, like a pig eating a snake, and a handful of grain was flung down. The fight began.

It was dark, below, and Burnes could see nothing of the sport; the faces were turned down in excited absorption, and all that could be heard was the occasional fierce cry from a boy, quickly stifled, the pipe and peck of two small birds fighting over a handful of grain. Burnes had seen the sport before, in the daylight, from this window. The rudimentary contest seemed never to weary or tire the street, and they squatted over the two little fat birds, watched them barge each other, pluck at each other with their fierce little beaks like toy birds, a harmless little bout between paint-bright tin birds, wheeling in their tin circles.

Down there, small cries of excitement, quickly muted, were being made; this was not a game for cheering at, but one where the small shrieks of the birds, rending and tearing each other’s little flesh for grain, was to be heard and winced over. This was the sport – the one thing, as it were – which kept Kabul quiet, and everyone watched it; underneath the window, Burnes had seen fine horsemen, street boys – even, a couple of times, an idle Newab Jubbur Khan leaving his house for a morning constitutional – pause for a moment before the rapt silent bout. It was too dark to see, from the window, what was happening; you could not see which of the two birds was succeeding, which was succumbing. There was only the faint tremulous cries of small fat birds, assaulting each other furiously over grain which neither of them would eat. Burnes drew back into the room.

The guard came in. But instead of sitting down in the corner, he stood at the door, and looked at them; at Burnes and Gerard and Mohan Lal. ‘He,’ the guard said finally, ‘will see you tomorrow.’ He made a small gesture with his head, the side-to-side twist, an acknowledgement of something, though none of them had said anything, and then left.

They stared at each other.

He will see you tomorrow, the guard had said, just that; and Burnes ran the sentence through his head, over and over again, to see if it was clear, if he had understood it correctly. Language brings opposite meanings so intimately together, and if the guard had said He will not see you tomorrow, there was a terrible danger that Burnes would have missed it. He ran through the sentence, over and over, adding words which he might have missed, substituting they for he, never for tomorrow, kill for see. He got to the end of it. He was absolutely sure of what he had heard. The Emperor of the Afghans would see them tomorrow.

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.