The Far Pavilions I-II [antikvár]

Ashton Hilary Akbar Pelham-Martyn was born in a camp near the crest of a pass in the Himalayas, and subsequently christened in a patent canvas bucket.His first cry competed manfully with the snarling call of a leopard on the hillside below, and his first breath had been a lungful of the cold air that blew down from the far rampart of the mountains, bringing with it a clean scent of snow and pine-needles to thin the reek of hot lamp-oil, the smell of blood and sweat, and the pungent odour of pack-ponies.Isobel had shivered as the icy draught hfted the tent-flap and swayed the flame in the smoke-grimed hurricane lamp, and listening to her son's lusty cries had said weakly: 'He doesn't sound like a premature baby, does he? I suppose I-I must have-miscalculated . .She had: and it was a miscalculation that was to cost her dear. There are few of us, after all, who are called upon to pay for such errors with our lives.By the standards of the day, which were those of Victoria and her Albert, Isobel Ashton was held to be a shockingly unconventional young woman, and there had been a number of raised eyebrows and censorious comments when she had arrived in the cantoimient of Peshawar, on the North-West Frontier of India, in the year of the Great Exhibition, orphaned, unmarried and twenty-one, with the avowed intention of keeping house for her only remaining relative, her bachelor brother William, who had recently been appointed to the newly raised Corps of Guides.The eyebrows had risen even further when a year later she had married Professor Hilary Pelham-Martyn, the well-known linguist, ethnologist and botanist, and departed with him on a leisurely, planless exploration of the plains and foothills of Hindustan, unaccompanied by so much as a single female attendant.Hilary was middle-aged and eccentric, and no oneleast of all himself-was ever able to decide why he should suddenly have elected to marry a portionless, though admittedly pretty giri, less than half his age and quite unacquainted with the East; or, having remained a bachelor for so many years, married at all. Isobel's reasons, in the opinion of Peshawar society, were more easily explained:fThere had been little conversation that night, as all three travellers were tired, and once in bed Ash had slept better than he had for many weeks.His bed had been put out on a partially screened roof for greater coolness, and awakening in the pearly hot-weather dawn he looked down from the parapet and saw Zarin at his prayers in the garden below. Waiting until these were over, he went down to join him and walk and talk under fruit trees that were full of birds greeting the new day with a clamour of cawmg and song. The talk had been mainly of the Regiment, for the subject of Gulkote could keep until Koda Dad was ready to listen, and Zarin had closed the long gap of the past year by bringing Ash up to date on a number of matters that for one reason or another he had not wished to entrust to a bazaar letter-writer. Details concerning his personal life and items of news about various men of Ash's old troop: the possibility of trouble with the Jowaki Afridis over the construction of a cart-road through the Khyber Pass, and the doings of those who had provided an escort for the Padishah's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, when he visited Lahore during the past cold weather.The Prince, said Zarin, had been so pleased by the bearing and behaviour of the Guides that he had written to his august mother, who had replied by appointing him Honorary Colonel to the Corps, and commanding that in future the Guides should be styled 'The Queen's Own Corps of Guides' and wear on their colours and ap-pomtments the Royal Cypher within the Garter (Zarin's translation of this last would have startled the College of Heralds considerably). By the time they had eaten the morning meal the sun was up, and after they had paid their respects to the lady of the housewho received them seated behind an ancient and much broken chik through which she could be plainly seen, but which preserved, if only technically, the rules of purdah-they were free to seek out Zarin's father.It was already too hot to be abroad, so the three of them had spent the day in the old, high-ceilmged room that had been allotted to Koda Dad because it was the coolest in the house. Here, protected from the heat by kus-kus tatties, and sitting cross-legged on the un-carpeted floor of polished chunam that was pleasantly cool to the