The View from Mount Dog Read Free Page B

Shaduf, and the time was not far off when the monarch would be able to start practising shunting. The only thing which secretly troubled Reg Burnshaw was the lack of passengers. He had endless rolling stock at his disposal: elegant dining cars, sleeping cars, couchettes and carriages, all of them air-conditioned and all of them practically empty. The Sultanate’s population – barely two hundred thousand people – preferred either their Cadillacs or their Cessnas for travel. Rail was somehow not very chic unless one could commandeer an entire train for one’s family, and the choice of route was so restricted it seemed hardly worth it.
    ‘You wait till we get the branch line going,’ said the Sultan happily. The branch line as projected was to climb slowly up the escarpment for sixty miles in a series of breathtaking panoramic curves before reaching the plateau. Then there was to be a single flat-out straight all the one hundred and fifteen miles to Rifa’aq, a tiny oasis not far from the border. There was nothing in Rifa’aq, certainly nothing worth building a railway to; but there again, as the Sultan reflected, it’s not the destination but the journey which counts. He remembered his old English tutor telling him that, and he had been absolutely right; the man had obviously been a genius, and if he were still alive there was no honour and dignity his ex-pupil would not have heaped on him.
    Apart from the railway, however, there was not much nowadays to brighten the Sultan’s eye. He began indulging in an activity which more than almost any other must be the mark of civilised and melancholic man: he took to spending long hours in the bath. Lying there in his capacious glass chalice, big toe comfortingly inserted into the hole of one of the gold taps, he was struck one day with an amazing realisation. He was fed up with being Sultan. That couldn’t be right. He poured some more bath salts in and swirled them around with his brown beringed hands. Not fed up with being Sultan exactly, just fed up with having to act Sultan. It was then he recalled something else from that tea-party in Buckingham Palace over a year ago. That woman in the newspaper…. Well, why not?
    It was difficult. Indeed, to anyone without his limitless financial resources it would have been almost impossible. The rise and fall of the damascene blade in small villages over the last decades had scarcely helped, but a cadet branch of thefamily was unearthed in South Yemen. Arrangements were made with the finest plastic surgeons money could procure. The secrecy was awesome, the threats terrifying, the results astonishing. One afternoon the Sultan’s private Boeing landed at an airport in Italy and taxied to a remote corner of the field. A car with smoked windows drew up and a man wearing dark glasses hurried up the steps of the plane. The Boeing immediately took off and sped southwards. Once it was over the Mediterranean the Sultan was introduced to his double.
    He had expected to find it uncanny, instead of which he found it absurd. Since he was quite certain he was himself he could see little resemblance in the man standing opposite him. He looked like any other handsome Middle Easterner with a sensibly shaped nose and chin. It further annoyed him that everybody else thought it was hard to tell them apart. The fellow was clearly an impostor, and for a moment he wondered whether to call the entire thing off and bring Faroukh el Damm, the Sultan’s private executioner, out of semi-retirement to keep his hand in. It would, after all, never do to get the public executioner to do it in the Maidan: from a distance the crowd might easily mistake the victim and it could trigger off an unseemly power struggle. But then fresh memories came to him of meetings with businessmen, of Islamic fundamentalists with bushy beards and wild eyes, of OPEC ministers talking about quotas, and his resolve hardened.
    To his surprise the ploy was extraordinarily successful.