In Xanadu Read Free Page B

unable to enter either Syria or Iran. There were also worries as to our reception in Iran. The previous year a British student of our own age had been arrested while travelling through the country and was still languishing in an Iranian jail on espionage charges. Most serious of all was the shadow of gloom cast by a travel article which appeared in The Times only two days before our departure. It claimed that while the Karakoram Highway was indeed open to foreign travellers, only those foreigners who were part of a tour group would be allowed into China. The only exceptions were those who had booked accommodation at Tashkurgan, the first town in China. This, claimed the article, could only be done via Peking, and took six months to arrange.
    The next morning I got a phone call from Louisa. She had heard that I was still planning to go on the trip. She would be back from Orkney by mid-August. Would I like her to come on the second half of the journey, from Lahore to Peking? I said yes. I did not tell her about the article. That hurdle would have to be jumped when we came to ii.
    Thus I committed myself to travelling across twelve thousand miles of extremely dangerous, inhospitable territory, much of which seemed still to be closed to foreigners, with two companions, one a complete stranger, the other completely estranged. Perhaps I should have consulted a doctor; instead I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket to Jerusalem.
     
     
    I got back from the Holy Sepulchre in time for breakfast. Laura and I were staying, on slightly dubious credentials, at the British School of Archaeology, the creation of the great Dame Kathleen Kenyon and still surviving as a piece of turn-of-the-century Oxbridge-in-the-Orient. Sheer obscurity seemed to have saved it from the late twentieth century in general and government cuts in particular. It was the home of a collection of shy, bookish scholars who pottered away digging up remote crusader castles in the Judean Hills and editing multi-volume works on the Roman sewer systems of Jerusalem. The week we were there the diggers had just found a small, rather plain waterleaf capital which was the cause of great excitement.
    The tone of the school was formal. This was particularly so of the meals, and of these, none more so than breakfast. The school serves certainly the best (and possibly the only) bacon and eggs east of Rome. However, not wishing to embarrass any local Palestinian archaeologists who might be staying, the school also serves a supplementary course of feta cheese, olives, tomatoes and pitta bread - and throws in watermelons, yoghurt, toast and marmalade for good measure. This agreeable feast is served in two shifts. The first is at five a.m. and is meant for the diggers. The second and slightly larger sitting is at eight a.m. and is intended for researchers, post-excavation experts and anyone else who has managed not to be woken up by the diggers three hours earlier. On the morning in question this included Laura, who was deep in her bacon and eggs when I returned from my rendezvous with Brother Fabian. I was looking forward to spending a leisurely few days at the school, seeing Jerusalem and generally acclimatizing before setting off to the unknown horrors of Syria. But it was not to be.
    At breakfast Laura produced for the first time a document that was to terrorize the rest of the trip: Laura's Schedule. This harmless-looking piece of paper was filled with a series of impossible deadlines culminating in the laughable goal of reaching Lahore by the end of August. Its immediate import, however, was that we were to leave Jerusalem at lunchtime. My protests were quickly quashed. If I wanted to see the city a last time I was free to do so, Laura announced, but I had to report back by twelve-thirty. One of the researchers, a young hen-pecked academic doing a PhD on Mameluke pottery took pity on me and gave me a lift to Jaffa Gate in his van; I had three hours to explore.
    The town had