In theory we could build our new HQ with almost no impact on Thulahn: there was a contingency plan for building the new airport in the same valley as Mount Juppala; it would mean levelling off a smaller mountain, but it was less than had been done for the new Hong Kong airport, and we could afford it.  Doing all we could do, undertaking every improvement we were prepared to offer, would change the entire country, and especially Thuhn, probably for ever, which sounded terrible given how beautiful and unspoiled it was and how happy the people seemed to be.  But then you looked at the infant-mortality rate, the life-expectancy figures and the numbers who emigrated.

If we only offered these changes/improvements, rather than imposed them, how could it be wrong?

I had no idea.  At the very least, before I decided anything, I needed a while here, just to start getting the feel of the place.  This process was due to start tomorrow, with a visit to the apparently fearsomely weird Queen Mother, in her own palace, further up the valley.

Legend had it she hadn't left her bed for the last twenty-six years.  I curled up under the weight of bedclothes and cupped my still cold hands, rubbing them and blowing into them and wondering why staying in bed for as long as humanly possible was considered even remotely weird in Thulahn.

CHAPTER EIGHT

You rise with the sun in Thulahn.  The same as any place where artificial light is still a novelty, I suppose.  I woke to find a little fat quilted lady bustling around my room, slamming open the window shutters to let in some eye-wateringly bright light, talking away either to herself or possibly to me and pointing at the washstand, where a large, gently steaming pitcher now stood beside the inset bowl.  I was still rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something rude to say, like, When were your people thinking of inventing the Door Lock, or even the Knock? when she just bustled straight out again and left me alone and grumpy.

I washed with the warm water in the bowl.  There was a bathroom down the end of the hall with a large fireplace in one corner and a rather grand scroll-topped bath on a platform in the middle of the room, but it took a lot of water-pitchers to fill it and the palace servants clearly required advance notice to organise both the fire and the water.

Technically my room was en suite, if a cubicle the size of a telephone box with the end of a pipe sticking up between two shoe-shaped tiles counts as en suite. There was real toilet paper, but it was miniaturised and unhelpfully shiny.  I flushed with the water out of the washing bowl.

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 plural: 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.