'Kathryn?'

'Mr Hazleton.'

'You are well, I hope?'

'I'm fine.'

'And your stay in Thulahn, is that going well?'

'Very well.'

'I've never been.  Would you recommend a visit?'

'That depends on your tastes, Mr Hazleton.  It's fine if you like lots of mountains and snow.'

'You don't sound very enamoured of the place, Kathryn.'

'I like lots of mountains and snow.'

'I see.  I was wondering.  I was trying to decide whether you'd decided.  Trying to make up my mind whether you had made up your mind, or not.'

'Uh-huh.'

'You're being very reticent, Kathryn.'

'Am I?'

'Is there somebody else there in the room with you?'

'No.'

'You're upset with me, aren't you?'

'Upset, Mr Hazleton?'

'Kathryn, I do hope you believe me when I say I had nothing to do with the contents of that disc.  It came into my possession and I confess I thought to turn it to my advantage, but what else was I supposed to do? …Kathryn, if I'm wasting my time with this call, tell me and I'll hang up. Perhaps we can talk again later.'

'What was the purpose of your call, Mr Hazleton?'

'I wanted to know if you'd come to a decision regarding the contents of the disc I had delivered to you.  Have you decided to do nothing, or are you still mulling it over?'

'Oh, I'm mulling.  Mulling away furiously here.'

'Are you, Kathryn?'

'Would I lie to you, Mr Hazleton?'

'I imagine you would if you thought it was the right thing to do, Kathryn.'

'Well, I'm still thinking.'

'The problem hasn't gone away, I'm afraid.  Right now, even as we speak, Mrs Buzetski is —'

'Boston.  She's in Boston, and she's not really visiting an old school chum at all.'

'Ah.  You know.  You must have spoken to Stephen.  How is he?  Do you think he suspects anything yet?'

'I'm sure I couldn't say, Mr Hazleton.'

'I'd better go, Kathryn.  Give my regards to the Prince when he gets there, will you?'

In the late afternoon Langtuhn Hemblu appeared and announced he was to take me to the Foreign Ministry for the formalities to be completed.  I was to bring my passport.  I asked him to wait and changed into my ethnic clothes, then we took the Roller a short distance down into the crowded city to a squat building with plain-painted walls.

I was shown into a large room where a bulbously tiled cylindrical stove in one corner radiated heat and four young, yellow-robed clerks perched on high stools behind tall desks.  All four stared at me and then put their heads down and scribbled furiously when a tall, bald, orange-robed man appeared from a door to one side of the big stove, announced he was called Shlahm Thivelu, Senior Immigration Officer, and invited me into his office.

We sat on either side of an impressive desk topped by a curved gallery holding lots of compartments containing rolled-up documents.  Mr Thivelu put on a dainty pair of glasses and inspected both my passports as though he'd only ever seen one or two such odd documents before.

The last time I'd been here I'd gone through immigration control and customs in the arrivals hall at the airfield.  This had consisted of ducking through the cargo door of the crashed Dakota, giving my name to an adolescent sitting behind a tiny rickety desk and shaking his hand.  Obviously things had become a lot more formal since then.

Mr Thivelu nodded, searched about the desk for a while, muttered something about a damned stamp, then shrugged and wrote something into my UK passport before handing both back and wishing me a pleasant stay.

As I stepped out of the ministry I looked at what he had written.  He'd printed the date and Welcome To Thulahn. Langtuhn held the Roller's door open for me.  He was smiling widely. 'You look happy,' I said, as we set off back up the hill.

'Oh, yes, Ms Telman!' Langtuhn said, his face positively radiating happiness from the rear-view mirror. 'His Holiness the Prince will now be returning tomorrow!'

'Yes, unfortunately I'm not sure — what?' I jerked forward in my seat. 'Tomorrow?' I'd thought I'd have at least three more days here before having to worry about Suvinder showing up.

'Yes!  Isn't that wonderful news?  Now you will get to see him after all!  He too will be happy to see you, I'm sure.'

'Yes.  Yes, I expect he will.' I watched the Wildness Emporium slide past.  One of the Sikh brothers saw me; he smiled and waved enthusiastically.  I waved back feebly.

I couldn't even get the plane out; it had been and gone again since I'd arrived and tomorrow's inbound flight bringing the Prince was the next one.  The alternative to flying was finding some motorised transport and taking the long road north and west and eventually south and back to India.  Days of hair-raising travel and nights in dubious rest-houses, from what I'd heard.  Or I could hike straight out, if the passes were open, which was unlikely at this time of year.  I'd done some trekking in Nepal in my early twenties so I wasn't totally inexperienced, but I wasn't hill fit either, or that young any more.  Anyway, I supposed it would look terribly rude.

'What brings the Prince back so early?' I asked.

'We do not know,' Langtuhn admitted, hauling the ancient car straight as we passed a butcher's and skidded on a patch of what looked like chicken entrails.  He laughed. 'Perhaps he has run out of money in the Paris casino.'

'Ha ha,' I said.  I sat back.  Suvinder.  Oh, well.

Maybe having the Prince here wouldn't be so terrible.  He wasn't that difficult a guy to deal with and he would, I assumed, make it even easier for me to travel round the country and gain access to, well, whatever I needed to gain access to.  So, not such a bad thing after all.

Look on the bright side, I told myself.

The Prince arrived back the following morning.  What seemed like most of Thuhn turned out to watch the plane land.  It was another clear but bitingly cold day, though the wind was barely more than a breeze.  Langtuhn Hemblu, wearing a slightly threadbare chauffeur's outfit, which was a size or two too big for him and which included tall boots, jodhpurs and a peaked grey cap, drove me down to the airfield in the Rolls-Royce but explained apologetically that I would have to make my own way back to the palace, as the car would be required by the Prince and his entourage.  I told him this was fine by me and joined the crowd on the banking above the football pitch/airfield like everybody else.  They'd removed the far set of goalposts, I noticed.

Some of my little pillow friends appeared — Dulsung, Graumo and Pokuhm, if I'd got their names right — and we stood together, though they couldn't see very well over all the adults in front.  Dulsung was the smallest, so I lifted her on to my shoulders.  She giggled and slapped a pair of sticky hands on to my forehead, below my black fur hat.  The two boys looked up enviously at her, put their pointy-hatted heads together and conferred for a moment, then each tugged at the nearest pair of quilted trousers, pointed meaningfully up at Dulsung, and after some teasing were duly hoisted on to neighbouring sets of shoulders.

Everybody else seemed to see the plane before me.  People started pointing and a few cheers rang out.  Then I saw the tiny scrap of metal against the grey-black rocks of the mountains high above and away to one side, its dark shadow flickering over ridges and gullies as it tipped and fell towards us.  It looked about the size of a small bird of prey.  The sound of its engines was still lost in the spaces between the mountains.

I looked up towards Dulsung, pointed at the aircraft and said, 'Aeroplane.'

''Roplane.'

The plane raced down, wheeling and stooping through the winds, no longer making straight for us but heading diagonally across the sky above the ice-choked gorge.  It curved out to one side of the city, turned sharply over the gravel beds in the valley downstream and came flying back straight towards us.  The wind, I realised, must be in the opposite direction from when I'd landed.  The square-sectioned, hunched-looking craft seemed almost static in the air, the drone of its engines audible now.