I found many clues, many “perturbations,” especially when St. John’s obsession with Arabia led me to the various versions of the Thousand Nights and One Night. From the stories in that primordial text I was able to deduce the nature of the forces called djinn-their peculiar attachment to objects and physical arrangements-and to speculate on the insistently recurrent image of a “Castle of the Mountain of Clouds, which, built by one of the djinn who revolted from the covenant of Solomon, was cut off from the rest of the world.” [11] In his translation, Richard F. Burton mentions stories of the Devil trying to get aboard the Ark, and says that “people had seen and touched the ship on Ararat.” [12] And when at last I had calculated the nature of a big-but-unrecorded fact that could have caused the perturbations, I went looking for evidence of it.
And it was all right there in Kim Philby’s life. Anthony Cave Brown notes that in 1919 Prince Feisal had formally given young Kim a twenty-carat diamond, and I did not invent the designation or function of a rafiq. Philby was SIS Head of Station in Turkey in 1947 and ’48, and in his coy autobiography, My Silent War, he explains, or does not quite explain, his proposed “photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet frontier area…I called it Operation Spyglass…it would give me a cast-iron pretext for a long, hard look at the Turkish frontier region…I had learnt long before, while working for the Times, some of the tricks of dressing implausible thoughts in language that appealed to the more sober elements in the Athenaeum.” [13] And a page or two earlier: “After a first summer of reconnaissance, I would be better equipped for a more ambitious programme in 1948.” [14] In The Philby Conspiracy I learned that he “kept an odd souvenir of the period which in later years he displayed in his apartment in Beirut: a large photograph of Mount Ararat which stands on the Turkish-Soviet border.” [15] The rope attached to the dashboard of Philby’s jeep is described in Something Ventured, the autobiography of Monty Woodhouse, who was SIS Head of Station in Iran in 1951.
The explanation I arrived at was, admittedly, a fantastic one; not one that le Carré would have come up with, I daresay. But when I had fitted the djinn postulate in among all the published facts, they all fell satisfactorily into place at last, and suddenly made “sense.” Even my protagonist, Andrew Hale, was suggested by the fact that St. John Philby and young Kim did collect samples of water from the Jordan River in the summer of 1923; according to Anthony Cave Brown, “The collection had a purpose. It was claimed that the water contained special properties, and for centuries it had been drawn at that point and sent to England for christenings; they [St. John and Kim] would send the water to the British Museum to establish whether it really contained holy properties.” [16] The implied previous baptism there, and St. John’s evident concern about it, gave me the shape of Andrew Hale.
In his Moscow retirement Philby insisted that he had fled Beirut in 1963 aboard the Soviet freighter Dolmatova-though he was “short-tempered” when interviewer Phillip Knightley pressed him for details-but according to Eleanor, “I believe he walked a good deal of the way,” [17] and in The Philby Conspiracy we hear that “Philby told one of his children that he arrived in Moscow with his feet heavily bruised from a long and difficult walk.” [18] Early accounts of his escape have him crossing the border near Ararat, and in conversation with Knightley published in the last chapter of The Master Spy, Philby is quick to cut off a discussion of his old photograph of Mount Ararat. Knightley, and Chapman Pincher in Too Secret Too Long, agree that immediately upon his arrival in Moscow Philby was put into a KGB clinic.
And Philby, though an unbaptized atheist, did always seem to be uneasy with Christianity, particularly with Roman Catholicism. Brown recounts Philby’s claim of having suffered a nervous breakdown at Westminster School because of the “unending Christian instruction” [19] and also describes a visit Philby paid to a Roman Catholic ARAMCO political agent in Riyadh, shortly after St. John’s death-they discussed Catholicism, and Philby was so knowledgeable and at the same time so nervous about the faith that the agent wondered if he were not a lapsed Catholic considering reconciliation. Nicholas Elliott’s wife was a practicing Catholic, and in his autobiography Elliott mentions a cocktail party at which Philby mockingly asked her if she really did have “a firm purpose of amendment” each time she went to Confession; and I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to see in Philby’s banter a trace of wistful envy.
In her book, Eleanor Philby recounts how in 1963 Nicholas Elliott, having failed to persuade her not to fly to Moscow to visit Philby, took her to a cinema that was showing the Hitchcock movie The Birds. Elliott bought her ticket but then left her to watch it alone, presumably hoping that the movie might effectively make a point that he could not convey. Into his silence I’ve presumed to fit the admittedly extravagant-but, I think, consistent-premise of this story.
About the Author
TIM POWERS is the author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, and The Anubis Gates; the novel Declare; and the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call. He lives is San Bernardino, California.
