The View from Mount Dog Read Free

that rare, it would scarcely be an act of self-concealment to slink in rags about streets busy with air-conditioned limousines and pedestrians who did their shopping in Bond Street and Saks Fifth Avenue. And where did one go nowadays to hear the murmurs of discontent, theranklings of ingrates? The Sultan had no idea but he suspected there might not be any cafés and souks left, having been transmogrified by Divine Will into drugstore soda fountains and hypermarkets. Truly the whole thing needed thought.
    A year or so passed in which the wealth of the Sultanate increased while the spirits of its ruler declined. Pragmatic he may have been in straightforward matters involving damascene blades, but the Sultan was rapidly wearying. He was not an old man by any means – somewhat under fifty – but he was finding the relentless pace at which everything changed confusing and exhausting. Each evening when he stood on his balcony sniffing the familiar breeze he thought Jibnah had grown a little. How could he ever have been so foolish as to imagine he could find a camel-driver in this city? he wondered. It seemed years since he had even seen a camel. Now there were endless Daihatsu showrooms and Lear Jet shops. In his boyhood and youth – well, until only a few years ago, now he came to think about it – camel-meat was on sale everywhere and very good it was, too, hanging up on hooks in the markets so that you could see what you were buying. Now, he gathered, there were only air-conditioned supermarkets whose meat counters sold Australian mutton, Argentine beef and unnaturally huge, tasteless chickens, all of it bundled up in plastic film and stiff with ice.
    The burdens of State, though, were really getting him down. His days, albeit ever shorter on ceremony, were ever longer on being pestered for decisions and having to meet excruciatingly boring foreigners claiming to represent excruciatingly boring corporations. Awesomely keen to help the Sultanate develop, they were, as if they had just discovered within themselves gushing wells of altruism. To these the Sultan preserved a grave and passive demeanour except that he was unable to stop himself smiling as each of them inevitably said: ‘It is clearly in the interests of the country, Your Highness.’ They flew in on Concorde and stayed in the Jibnah Otani or the Oberoi or the Meridien, drove madly around ministries the next day, like as not seeing close relatives of his and leaving behind a spoor of glossy brochures full of half-truths written in a quaint businessman’s dialect; and then, full of mint tea and self-esteem, they would roar away the day after that heading for Jeddah, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Los Angeles on their restless mission to help countries develop.
    One morning the Sultan cracked. It was bound to happen and it was just plain bad luck for his visitor to have had his namedown in the Royal appointments-book on that particular day. He was the Sales Director of a vast and prestigious West German corporation which produced water desalination plants and he had just made a glowing pitch to install one at Manduri on the coast.
    The Sultan had listened abstractedly.
    ‘Tell me, Herr … er, Schönau, did you fly in last night on Concorde?’ he asked when it was over.
    ‘I did, Your Highness.’
    ‘I see. Well, you woke me up,’ the Sultan told him simply, ‘so I don’t want your water thing.’ His guest fought for words. ‘Besides,’ the monarch went on, ‘have you been to Manduri?’
    ‘Oh, yes, Your Highness. It is quite undeveloped, ideal for—’
    ‘I used to go there as a boy to collect shells. I had by far the best shell collection in the country, did you know that? No; well, even today it forms the core of the collection in our National Museum here in Jibnah. My English tutor taught me how to classify them, and we did it together. It was fun,’ he added, staring reminiscently at a little flag on his desk. ‘We lived in tents. Lots and lots of tents,