In Xanadu Read Free Page A

Venetian's footsteps. The previous summer I had walked from Edinburgh to Jerusalem following the route of the First Crusade. That journey had ended at the Holy Sepulchre; Marco Polo's journey began where the other finished. It was the obvious sequel.
    For a month Louisa and I planned the expedition. We argued over maps and atlases, sat in the Cambridge University Library reading up the history, toured the different embassies; I even managed to persuade my college to part with £700 to help finance it. With exams looming, I then disappeared into my books for two months, forgot about the trip and saw very little of Louisa. A fortnight before we were due to depart I met Lou for a drink outside a pub in Hammersmith. There, between delicate sips of sweet white wine, I was presented with a fait accompli. There was (sip) a new man (sip) and a new destination (sip); 'Edward' and 'Orkney' respectively. Reeling from the blow, I went off to a dinner party where I poured out my heart to the stranger who was sitting on my left. The recipient was called Laura. Although I had never met her before her reputation had gone before her. She was renowned as a formidable lady, frighteningly intelligent, physically tough, and if not conventionally beautiful, then at least sturdily handsome. I had heard that she was an Oxford ice-hockey blue and a scholar; I also knew that she was a fearless traveller. During her father's latest posting in Delhi, Laura had taken the opportunity to explore the entire subcontinent. Stories of her feats of endurance were common currency; if one half of them were true, she had by the age of twenty-one made Freya Starke look like a dilettante. It was said that travelling on her own she had penetrated the most inaccessible corners of the Deccan, cut a swathe through the jungles of Bengal, scaled some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas. Her finest moment had come in the communal riots that engulfed Delhi on the death of Mrs Gandhi. Trying to rescue a Sikh friend from street gangs, Laura had been cornered in a cul-de-sac by a party of rapists intent on violation. She had beaten them off single-handed, and, so the story went, left one of them permanently incapacitated.
    I had not been told that Laura was as impulsive as she was formidable. At the end of supper she announced that she would take Louisa's place, at least as far as Lahore, whence she could make her way home to Delhi. She had been planning to explore the Andes, but the Ayatollah's Iran sounded just her cup of tea. She would ring me in three days' time to confirm.
    Three days later, at the ominously early time of seven-thirty a.m., the telephone went. Of course she was coming, she told me. If I would meet her at the Syrian embassy in one hour we could begin collecting the necessary visas. Over the next two weeks Laura swept me around London as she slashed at red tape, assaulted passport officials, and humbled the bureaucracy of the Asian embassies. Under her supervision I was inspected, injected and protected against diseases I had never dreamt existed. My maps were thrown away and replaced with a set that looked as if they had been prepared by the CIA: they were covered in unexplained figures and inscribed the chilling warning AIRCRAFT INFRINGING UPON THE NON-FREE FLYING TERRITORY MAY BE FIRED UPON WITHOUT WARNING.
    Meanwhile, the full weight of Laura's connections was put into the planning of the expedition. Through devious means, visas were obtained for us for Iran. A way was found to get us from Israel to Syria: telex messages to Odessa led to us obtaining tickets for a ship which ran between Haifa in Israel and Limassol in Cyprus; berths were then booked in another ship which ran from Lamaca, at the other end of the island, to Latakia in Syria. There were still some problems. We had to make sure that the Israelis did not stamp our passports, nor let the Cypriot authorities indicate in any way how we had come to their island, if we failed in this we would be