Dreaming Of Samarkand

Martin Booth was born in 1944 and educated in Hong Kong. He has written for television and the cinema and is the biographer of Jim Corbett, the tiger conservationist. He has also written documentaries for television. His first novel, Hiroshima Joe, was an international bestseller, the Daily Telegraph calling it 'an outstanding achievement' and The Times nominating it as one of the ten best novels of its year. His second novel, The Jade Pavilion, appeared in 1987, his third Black Chameleon, the following year. Martin Booth lives in Somerset. ALSO BY MARTIN BOOTII Black Chameleon Hiroshima Joe The Jade Pavilion Martin Booth DREAMING OF SAMARKAND @ ARROW BOOKS Arrow Books Limited :z.o Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V :z.SA An imprint of Random Century Group London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson 1989 Arrow edition 1990 © 1989 by Martin Booth The right of Martin Booth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Courier International Ltd, Tiptree, Essex ISBN o 09 963510 o To Tony and Ulli Contents I 2. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I0 II 12. 13 Beirut: 5-10 December 19u Aleppo, Syria: 12.-14 February 1912. Beirut: late February/early March r 9 r 2. Areiya: May 1912. Carchemish: May 1912. Areiya, Aleppo and Carchemish: June/July 1912. Beirut and Areiya: July/October 1912. At sea, France and England: the Winter of 1912./13 At sea, Beirut, Halfati and Carchemish: January/March 1913 Beirut: the second week of March 1913 At sea, Beirut and Brumana, and Switzerland: March-June 1913 Switzerland: June-September 1913 Montana and Locarno, Switzerland: January and Spring 1914 9 43 65 92. I I 2. 12.8 168 2.I0 2.46 302. 307 347 380 1 Beirut: 5-Io December I9I I She could hear him coughing, spasmodically, from somewhere in the dark recesses of the house. Every so often he would stop, half-heartedly mumbling his Turkish exercise for the morning and she would wait, her own breathing suspended momentarily in sympathy, for the hiss of his breath and the raw rasp of his throat. Listening to him, she thought, was like listening to her mother snoring in the next room when she was a child. The calm silences between her mother's snores, filled only by the sound of night crickets, were worse than the snores themselves, for they were filled with frustration and anticipation - a longing for quietude yet with the expectant knowledge that it would not come. Helle put down the copy of Wordsworth she had been reading. Here on the verandah, the sun was hot, the air dry and motionless. In these hot hours, when the shade of the cypress was most deep, there was no bird-song. She had noticed the absence as soon as they had arrived in the Lebanon. Out in the garden, nothing moved except for the cat in the shadow of the cypress tree. Every so often, it flicked its tail from within its sleep, and she pondered whether the animal was dreaming or if this was a reflex action to drive ants or fleas from its fur. Every twitch of the tail brought up a soft puff of dust which did not blow away but settled on the cat's hindquarters, lightening its chocolate brown coat. 9 Dreaming of Samarkand 'I've had enough! There's no beauty in it.' She turned to