The View from Mount Dog Read online

  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 name down 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, all different colours. Tents for me and my brothers, tents for the Scottish nannies, tents for servants and guards and everyone. That was at Manduri. And now you want to build a huge water factory all over it? Well, you shall not. Today I give the order to make Manduri a National Conchology Reserve. And next time, Herr Schönau,’ the Sultan added in what might have been a whimsical attempt to soften the blow, ‘I suggest you fly Lufthansa. They have no Concordes.’

  This sudden impatience with businessmen coincided with an equally complete exasperation with politicians, be they local ones, visiting Arab heads of state or – in particular – American Congressmen. Sometimes it seemed as though he had spent much of his adult life kissing hairy cheeks and being lectured on the Sudan question, the Egyptian impasse, the Libyan dilemma, or the Syrian problem. Increasingly the hard-edged world of his youth was dissolving into an international slurry of détente, vetoes, UN votes, peace initiatives, OPEC summits and Gulf crises. What was it all for? he wondered. Why couldn’t people be a bit calmer and quieter as they had been before God was so good to his little Sultanate? It was wonderful indeed that the sands of the desert concealed a commodity which other people wanted, but why should that be any different from having a racing camel that somebody wanted, or a daughter, come to that? If they offered a good price and you were willing to sell, then that was that; you sold. If not, you hung on to your camel or daughter until someone happened by prepared to offer more. That surely was the essence of all business, always had been, and he couldn’t for the life of him work out why something so simple should be inflated into matters of such hopeless complexity…. He began leaving meetings early complaining of indigestion; then he took to avoiding them entirely, nominating Prince Bisfah and Prince Ashur as his proxies. Not that he had much confidence in his two eldest sons. Bisfah was seemingly unable to drive his red Italian cars along even the most deserted road without careering off among the dunes in search of the only boulder for miles to crash into, and Ashur…. Well, Ashur. The Sultan had once discovered that Ashur’s nickname at Harrow had been ‘The Queen of Sheba’ and that was not something a father forgot. He wondered if the Queen of England had known when they had last met. Hadn’t one of her own sons gone to Harrow? If so, he might well have told her. The Sultan’s cheeks burned. Maybe she had known all along and even as she had so graciously presided over the sponge cake she had been thinking That’s the father of the Queen of Sheba.

  The one thing which cheered the Sultan up was his new railway. Having to contend with none of the traditional obstacles to progress such as shortage of funds and recalcitrant labour, it had progressed rapidly and there was now a regular high-speed train service between Jibnah and Hafoos, a small provincial town at the foot of the Jebel Ahmar, that great escarpment of red sandstone which leads to the stony and waterless high plateau, one glimpse of which through a helicopter’s tinted and juddering windows makes oilmen wonder how on earth their mortgages can be taking so long to pay off. As often as he could, which was nothing like often enough, the Sultan would sit high up in the driver’s compartment of the giant French-built locomotive and thunder across the desert at a hundred and eighty miles an hour. Beside him sat his Minister of Railways, still keeping in practice as the Sultanate’s premier engine-driver. Since Reg Burnshaw’s bewildering translation from British Rail locoman to Minister and private engine-driver to His Most Serene Highness Sultan Yussuf Masood Ammar the two men had become very close and the Englishman was proud of his pupil. He now allowed the Sultan to take the handle for the tricky banked section – a miracle of engineering, incidentally – at Wadi 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 the family 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. After several months’ indoctrination – a tedious period for the Sultan when his double traipsed around the Palace of a Thousand and One Rooms aping the way he walked and repeating everything he said – the subterfuge was subjected to limited public gaze when the pseudo-Sultan took his place on a reviewing stand. All the man had to do was hold himself gravely at the salute while a succession of dun-coloured land-rovers bowled past, but he did it beautifully. He even fooled the Sultan’s High Command, who all privately agreed afterwards that they had not found him so alert and well informed for years. The Sultan himself remained in his bath and began drawing up the first National Railway timetable. It did occur to him, though, that it would be safer if both he and his double were not to live in the same palace. An irreducible number of essential people was in the know, of course, but sooner or later the Sultan’s apparent ability to be in two of the thousand and one rooms at once would arouse comment. He commissioned plans for a summer palace to which he could retreat, and in a remarkably short time a simple white pavilion was standing exactly in the middle of the site where a German corporation had once had vision of building a desalination plant. To this secluded coastal residence the Sultan moved one night with a skeleton staff and a concubine. At some point in the previous months his Yorkshire wife had become confused and was still paying visits to the Royal Bedchamber far away in Jibnah; there seemed no reason to suggest she stop.

  This moving away from the capital, this abandonment of the Palace marked a turning-point in the Sultan’s life. He became far less anxious, less preoccupied; he put on a little weight. He had commandeered a generous slice of the National Conchology Reserve for his new private residence and in it he lived a life of such freedom as he had not enjoyed for years. Screened from the eyes of Manduri’s tiny population by quick-growing conifers and slow-chewing sentries the Sultan began to enjoy himself. He sent back to Jibnah and spent a happy morning unpacking all his old shell-books. He sat on the floor of his bedroom in a pair of khaki shorts smelling the pages in wonderment that the grains of sand which fell out of them were from that very shore beyond the verandah and had lain in fragrant darkness since his own boy’s feet had scuffed them there and his own boy’s hands had shut them in. He stared at his large jewelled fingers and thought about time and Mr Munson and Nannie MacWhirter and sighed. Well, from now on he was going to have a lot more fun.

  He still had to go back to Jibnah now and then, of course. There were things involving the family which could not be left to an outsider (remarkably few things, he noticed) and likewise things involving the State for which he was reluctant to delegate responsibility. For most daily purposes, though, the fake Sultan drove about Jibnah in a perfectly genuine Rolls-Royce exciting quite unfeigned obeisance. Both of them thought about this and each in his own way marvelled.

  Another year passed in which the pseudo-Sultan took over almost all executive power and had grown so familiar with the role he was playing that for days on end he could forget it was a role. To all intents and purposes he was the Sultan, and the irony pleased him. So did his new life-style, which was a great improvement on what he had been used to in South Yemen. He liked the perks and trappings, the sumptuous robes, the arcane protocols, the guards with scimitars in their belts and Berettas under their embroidered tunics. He enjoyed the parades with camels wearing kettledrums slung from their humps, he liked bugles and jet aircraft in formation overhead. He liked banquets a lot and he loved concubines very much indeed. In the early days he was even quite amused by playing monarch with the jet-set businessmen and politicians. Many of his decisions were fairly arbitrary; several were positively quirky. He unexpectedly welcomed a delegation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, gave them full permission to build a large and costly Kingdom Hall in Jibnah and, when it was finished, confiscated it without compensation. He gave the Witnesses a day to leave the Sultanate and converted their Hall into a braille school for blind Imams. People openly thanked God that the Sultan had regained his old spiritedness.

  But abuses of power may herald a growing disenchantment with it as much as a craving for more of it, and so it was in the case of the pseudo-Sultan. After making sure that nobody in his own family could ever conceivably lack for the odd ten million dollars and after indulging himself royally at – apparently – nobody’s expense he, too, began to grow restless. The real trouble was that life in Jibnah was dull. Whatever he wanted, almost whatever he wanted, would instantly be brought him; but that was not the same as being able to wander around the world looking for nothing in particular but indulging his fancies with somebody else’s platinum American Express card. Jibnah was the conservative and provincial little capital of a conservative and provincial little sultanate, and the pseudo-Sultan felt himself inhibited from asking for certain things he quite wished to toy with. For example, he dearly wanted to try cocaine ever since talking to the American ambassador’s son, but he was far too embarrassed to ask. He also longed to learn how to waterski, but the idea of having to flounder about in front of lickspittle aides pretending to be overwhelmed by His Most Serene Highness’s God-given skill was enough to deter him. Why could he not practise in private with just a single motor-boat driver who could instantly be rendered headless at the slightest suspicion of a snigger? But he couldn’t: security was obsessive and Court protocols inflexible. Besides, vague memories came to him of Paris Match pictures from the fifties, grainy black-and-white photos of playboy monarchs such as King Faroukh being towed around behind boats in places like Monaco wearing dark glasses and looking like p
ortly beetles. That was not the figure the pseudo-Sultan wished to cut for himself.

  After sunset he would often stand on the Palace balcony as the Sultan had before him, made introspective by the evening breeze, which seemed nightly to contain less mimosa and more exhaust-fumes. The city, until so recently a shady little oasis scattered with flocks and tents and houses like whitewashed cubes, had grown so that one of the shopping malls now ended abruptly at the airport’s perimeter. Bad planning there, he thought and wondered if the odd head shouldn’t roll, but then his attention was redistracted by the sight of listless knots of European Gastarbeiter making their way slowly up the boulevards in front of the Palace, sweeping the drifts of crumpled petrodollars into little piles and setting fire to them. A great sense of unease and thwart came upon him.

  It was inevitable, of course, that he should have hit on the same solution and that it should then have seemed so obvious. No need to tell the Sultan; much better not, in fact, since he was by all accounts becoming more and more reclusive and would now only talk with any interest about cowries and winkles. Using the same methods by which he had himself been so successfully recruited, the pseudo-Sultan quietly introduced a second pseudo-Sultan into the Palace of a Thousand and One Rooms. It might have been thought such a move would lead to complexities unimagined since the death of Feydeau. Not a bit of it. Most of the Palace staff were desert fathers who had been retainers to the Sultan’s family since birth and tended towards age and forgetfulness. A few of the more alert ones below sixty wondered at their monarch’s extraordinary energy and slight departures from habit and custom but reflected that the Masood Ammar boys always had been headstrong and gave it no more thought. The Sultana from Harrogate marvelled at the efficacy of the tablets compounded of ginseng and dried scorpion venom which her husband had begun taking. Even the Sultan, when he paid a surprise visit to the Palace to look for a scrapbook he had once made, noticed nothing on running into his second double. His original double, fortuitously out of town for an important meeting with the son of the American ambassador, heaved a sigh of relief when he heard. That was one of the really wonderful things about conservatism, he reflected: it never wanted to know anything. Just as long as things looked right, with the correctly dressed people coming through the right doors at the right time of day and uttering the same prescribed formulas, things were right. What did it matter whether somebody were actually the person he purported to be? As long as whoever it was acted in character and looked the part there would never be any end to the motorcades and the cheering crowds. With all that dead weight of conditioned reflex working in one’s favour the only real enemy was one’s own disenchantment, the deadly tedium of the puppetry, the awareness of dwindling days.