Caravans by James A. Michener Page A

Nur to push open the door with his pot of boiling water for my shave. My face luxuriated in the soothing water, and as I scraped my beard, I asked, “How much time?”
    “It’s past ten,” he warned, and I looked into the hall to greet him, brown, well shaved, dressed in western clothes and karakul cap, waiting to lead me to our breakfast. This morning he was bursting with a special pride. “I’m also to attend His Excellency’s meeting,” he confided, and I saw that he had used my shoe box to freshen his shoes as well as mine. Such things he was not required to do. He was my official helper at the embassy, but he was a married man and had asked if he could augment his salary by overseeing the servants at my house. “Otherwise, Sahib, they’ll steal you blind. They’re Afghans, you know.”
    I lived in one of the new houses on the far side of the public park that dominated the north arm of Kabul: to the west lay the British dormitory,within walking distance, while to the east stood the American embassy, also close at hand. When I had finished shaving I slipped into an Afghan robe and went onto the roof of my house to view once more a scene far more important to me than either the British dormitory or the American embassy. I wished to inspect the mountains and thus remind myself of where I was.
    I looked first to the west, where the poetic Koh-i-Baba mountains stood shimmering in the sunlight, so near they could almost be felt, so graceful and varied that they seemed like Gothic sculpture rather than real mountains. To the north stood the great, somber Hindu Kush, heavy and foreboding. They had been named, local legend insisted, The Hindu Killers because of what they had done to the natives of India who tried to cross them seeking the profitable trade of Samarkand. Whenever during my working day I caught a glimpse of the Hindu Kush I felt that I was in direct link with the heartland of Asia.
    For to the east these master mountains of Afghanistan joined the Pamirs, the impenetrable, mysterious massif that guarded the meeting place of nations; and these in turn led to the Karakorams, most inaccessible of the Asian mountains, on whose flanks lived the Hunza people, the Gilgits and the Kashmiris. South of the Karakorams came the Himalayas themselves on their eastward sweep down the spine of Asia.
    Thus each morning when I greeted the mountains I felt myself in contact not only with Afghanistan but with the entire continent of Asia and with my own past: the wartime flights over the Himalayasinto China; the intelligence mission into Gilgit, perched in the clouds; the great sea battles off the eastern flank of Asia; and now my job with the State Department in Kabul. I breathed deeply half a dozen times, imagined the ponderous ballet of the mountains as they swept across Asia, and went down to where Nur Muhammad and the servants had arranged breakfast.
    For his eleven-o’clock meeting Captain Verbruggen had collected the four members of our staff best informed on the Ellen Jaspar affair. Richardson of Intelligence was there, a tweedy, pipe-smoking gentleman who affected a British-type mustache and who was favorably known for talking sense, primarily because he refused to give any opinion unless it was fortified by documents. He had reached the State Department via the F.B.I. and was an expert in security and Russian intentions. We supposed that he had been assigned to Afghanistan only briefly in order to study the southern flank of Russia where it impinged on Afghanistan. He felt the case of the Jaspar girl to be an intrusion and frequently said so. But now he sat confidently, his hands folded on his own intelligence file, just waiting for us to ask him questions.
    Nexler, the subtle brains of the embassy, was also present, a self-effacing man in his late forties and the only one on our staff who enjoyed secure status in the real hierarchy of State. Unlike the rest of us, he had not come to the department from some other