Caravans by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online Page B

perfume.
    “These damned girls!” The old man laughed. “They douse their chaderies with cheap French essence. To make the boys notice them more. Smell this!” And he picked up the fawn chaderi and smothered my face with it. The perfume was heavy and clung to my nostrils after he had withdrawn the silk.
    The old warrior put his arm about me and said, “Monsieur Miller, concerning the Jaspar girl. Wedo have one bit of additional information. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it information. Nothing but absurd speculation, I suspect. Anyway, it’s so bizarre, really, that I won’t suffer myself to repeat it. Perhaps it represents what happened, but when you get to Kandahar you’ll undoubtedly hear the rumor. So you judge for yourself.”
    “You won’t tell me?” I begged.
    “I would abhor having in your file my name even remotely attached to such a rumor. I’ve my reputation to consider. But you’re a younger man. You can risk such embarrassments, and I wish you Godspeed.” I was always astonished to rediscover that Muslims shared our God in exactly the form we used Him. There it was, old Shah Khan wishing me Godspeed, and there could be no doubt that he was referring to the One God.
    “Papers authorizing your travel to Kandahar and wherever else you may have to go in the area will be at your office in the morning,” the old man assured me.
    “Thank you, Shah Khan,” I replied, and when he opened the door leading to the waiting jeep I saw his son, Moheb Khan, once more upon the white horse, leaping and twisting and roaring off across the snow. As he disappeared in a cloud of flakes I thought: That must be the only horse in the world branded with a W for the Wharton School in Philadelphia.

In Afghanistan almost every building bears jagged testimony to some outrage. Some, like the walled fortress now owned by Shah Khan, were built to withstand sieges, and did so many times. Others were the scenes of horrible murder and retaliation. In distant areas, scars still remained of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Nadir Shah, of Persia. Was there ever a land so overrun by terror and devastation as Afghanistan?
    Yet of all the buildings which testified to acts of violence none was more evocative than the group that huddled within the British compound, for here scenes of terrible defeat and massacre had taken place, here loyalties were betrayed, here brave men died with daggers across their throats, and the fact that the British still maintained friendly relations with Afghanistan was tribute to English resilience.
    In 1946 the British compound was probably the most civilized center in Afghanistan, a fortress of its own well out into the country, with its private gardens, tennis courts and restaurants. It was here that the European community, in which the Americans were grudgingly included, met on long winter evenings to read plays. Tonight, fresh from thetypewriters of the English, Italian and American embassies, in that order, the play was to be
Born Yesterday,
a boisterous comedy which had opened in New York only the month before. Ingrid, a stately Swedish girl, was scheduled to read the part of Billie Dawn. An Englishman who imagined that he could talk like an American gangster was to be Harry Brock, and I was to read the part of the
New Republic
reporter.
    Italians, Frenchmen and the Turkish ambassador’s wife completed the cast, and looking back upon such readings I am still impressed by the intellectual pleasure we had when the snow was so high in Kabul. We were, in a very real sense, cut off from everything that civilized men and women had come to take for granted: books, magazines, theaters, hotels, music. All we had were our own personalities, with what understandings and memories we had acquired through the years; and it was reassuring to discover what a vivid social life was possible under those circumstances. Never have I known better wit nor more exciting conversation than in the crowded little