The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

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