Breakfast was served in the room by my little fat quilted lady, who arrived talking, talked as she plonked down the plates and jugs and kept talking as she nodded to me and left. I could hear her talking all the way down the hall. Maybe it was a religious thing, I thought; the opposite of a vow of silence.
Breakfast consisted of stiff fried pancakes and a bowl of watery porridge. I tried a little of each, recalled the variety of mono-taste beige food from the evening before and was reminded that managing my weight, and indeed even losing quite a few pounds in a matter of days, had proved remarkably easy the last time I'd visited Thulahn.
'Her Royal Highness is looking forward to meeting you.'
'Is she? That's nice.' I grabbed a strap and hung on.
Thulahn had cars before it had roads. Somehow, this came as no surprise. Well, it had a car, if not in the pluraclass="underline" a 1919 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith purchased in India by the Prince's great-grandfather when he was King. It had been dismantled and carried across the mountain paths by teams of sherpas and eventually reassembled in Thulahn the following summer.
There was, however, nowhere to drive it, a point which had perhaps escaped the then King when he'd made the purchase. At the time a main road in Thulahn consisted of a boulder-strewn pathlet wandering along the side of a steep hill with broader bits every now and again where two heavily laden porters or yaks could pass without one knocking the other off the cliff, while a principal street in Thuhn was basically a shallow V between the randomly sized and sited buildings with a stream-cum-sewer in the bottom and lots of little paths strung out along the sides.
As a result, the Roller sat within the main courtyard of the palace for five years, where it was just about possible to run it in a figure of eight providing the wheel was kept at full lock the whole time and the transition from left to right or vice versa was accomplished without undue delay. Hours of fun for the royal children. Meanwhile a road, of sorts, was constructed, from the floor of the valley where most of the farms were, through Thuhn and on up to the glacier foot, where the old palace and the more important monasteries clung like particularly determined limpets to the cliffs.
I was in that car, on that road, now. My driver was Langtuhn Hemblu, the man who'd greeted me at the airstrip the day before and given me the rapid guided walking tour of the city and palace before abandoning me to the colourful monks.
'You mustn't worry,' Langtuhn shouted.
'About what?'
'Why, about meeting Her Royal Highness.'
'Oh, all right, then.' Well, I hadn't been. Langtuhn caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled in what was probably meant to be an encouraging manner.
As far as I could tell his title was Important Steward. I strongly suspected he'd never taken a driving test. It wasn't even as though there was no other motorised traffic around any more: registered in Thuhn alone there were now at least seventeen other cars, buses, vans and trucks to have collisions with, most brought in during the heady days of Thulahn's motoring Golden Age, between the summer of 1989, when a supposedly permanent road had been completed direct from Thuhn to the outside world, and the spring of 1991, when a series of landslides and floods had swept it away again.
There were a few more roads within the kingdom nowadays, and except in the depths of winter (when they were blocked by snow), or during the monsoon (when they tended to get washed away) you could drive from Thuhn down the valley through various other, lower towns, then on down the course of the Kamalahn river and into Sikkim where, season permitting, you actually had a choice: turn left for Darjeeling and India, or right for Lhasa and Tibet. There was, still, a track direct from Thuhn back over the mountains that almost encircled the capital and which allowed a very determined driver to bring a four-wheel drive in over the passes from India, but even that meant sliding the vehicle across in a cradle slung under a wire hawser over the river Khunde.
The Roller bounced and lurched. I clung on. It felt very strange to sit in a car with no seat-belts. Grab-handles and straps didn't give even the illusion of safety.
I'd dressed in as many layers of the clothes I'd brought with me as I could. Even so, I was glad of the little wood-burning stove in one corner of the car's rear compartment. This looked like an after-market accessory and I doubted the boys at RR would have approved, but it helped stop my breath freezing on the windows. I made a mental note to buy some warmer clothes in the afternoon, assuming I survived that long.
The road which wound up through the capital consisted of big flat stones laid across one of the main V-shaped streets-cum-streams-cum-sewers. Langtuhn had explained that as there was just the one main road, it had been designed to take in as many important buildings as possible en route, hence the tortuous nature of the course it took, which often involved doubling back on itself and heading downhill again to take in buildings of particular consequence, such as the Foreign Ministry, the important consulates (this seemed to mean the Indian and Pakistani compounds), an especially popular temple or a much-loved tea house.
Most of the buildings in Thuhn were constructed, for the first one or two storeys at least, from large, dark blocks of rough stone. The walls were almost vertical but not quite, spreading out at the base as though they'd started to melt at some point in the past.
They generally looked worn but tended, and most had fresh-looking two-tone paint jobs, though a few sported patches and friezes of brightly painted plaster depicting scenes from the Thulahnese version of Hinduism's idea of the spirit world, which — from the gleeful illustrations of people being impaled on giant stakes, eaten by demons, torn to pieces by giant birds, sodomised by leering, prodigiously endowed yak-minotaurs and skinned alive by grinning dragons wielding giant adzes — looked like the sort of place the Marquis de Sade would have felt thoroughly at home in.
The top storeys were made of wood, pierced by small windows, painted in bright primary colours and strewn with long prayer flags twisting sinuously in the wind.
We skidded round a corner and the Wraith's engine laboured to propel us up the steep slope. People ambled or jumped out of the way — depending on how soon they heard us coming — as we rumbled and bounced across the uneven flagstones.
'Oh, I have your book!' Langtuhn said. 'Please. Here.'
'What book?' I reached out to the opening in the glass partition and accepted a small dog-eared paperback with a two-colour cover.
'The book you left on your last visit.'
'Oh, yes.' A Guide To Thulahn, the cover said. I'd picked it up in Dacca airport four years earlier and vaguely recalled leaving it in my room in the Grand Imperial Tea Room and Resting House — a sort of de-glorified youth hostel — which had been my base the last time I'd been here. I remembered thinking at the time that I had never encountered a book with so many misprints, mistakes and misspellings. As quickly as I could without taking my gloves off I flicked to the work's notoriously unreliable 'Top Tips and Handey Phrases' section and looked up the Thulahnese for Thank you. 'Khumtal,' I said.
'Gumpo,' Langtuhn said with a big smile. I had the worrying feeling that this was the sixth Marx Brother, but it turned out to mean 'You're welcome'.
We cleared the city; the road stopped twisting wildly at random and started twisting wildly at regular intervals, zigzagging steeply up the boulder-littered side of the mountain. Dotted along the roadside amongst the houses were more tall masts, prayer flags, squat stone bell-shaped stupas and thin wooden prayer windmills, their sails painted with dense passages of holy script. The houses themselves were sporadically spaced, turf-roofed and, from a distance, easily mistaken for piles of stones. People walking downhill under dripping, small but heavy-looking packs, or trudging uphill under huge and heavy-looking bundles of wood or dung, stopped and waved at us. I waved back cheerfully.