The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

  “That’s right,” said Philippa. “How are you feeling now?”

  “My head feels like a hot-air balloon,” said Nimrod. “But I’ll be all right.”

  Philippa looked relieved. “I was worried about you, Uncle Nimrod.”

  “We both were,” admitted Moo. “We may have the Joseph Rock papers at our disposal, but neither of us really knows the way to Shamba-la. Let alone Tibet.”

  “Yes.” Nimrod nodded. “There’s still a long way to go. About two thousand four hundred miles, to be exact. Tibet’s not called the roof of the world for nothing. You need a long ladder to get up there.”

  “Mr. Swaraswati will be delighted,” said Moo. “To be flying again.”

  Nimrod glanced around the room where he had been receiving treatment. “By the way,” he said. “Where is Mr. Swaraswati?”

  “I left him where we landed,” explained Philippa. “With the flying carpet.”

  “And where is that?” asked Nimrod.

  “Well, we’re in Kazakhstan,” said Philippa. “And this is a town called Atyrau. So I guess you could say that we left them a couple of miles outside Atyrau. In a kind of valley. It’s all right. He’s with Mr. Burton and Mr. Prezzolini.”

  “And who’s with them?” Nimrod sighed.

  “Er, no one,” said Philippa.

  “That was stupid, stupid, stupid. Haven’t I made it clear that Mr. Swaraswati is much too valuable to leave anywhere? The importance of what that man knows cannot be exaggerated.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Nimrod,” said Moo. “Philippa was only trying to help you. We thought you might be seriously injured. I might have known it would take more than a bird crashing onto your big head to knock some sense into it.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Nimrod. “Philippa, I’m sorry. It was churlish of me to complain. All the same, we’d better be getting back. It’ll be dark soon and we wouldn’t want to lose them, would we?”

  Mr. Bayuleev took them back to the spot where they had landed and where Mr. Swaraswati and Mr. Burton and Mr. Prezzolini were waiting for them; but they were no longer seated on the blue carpet. They were standing up and waving their arms and looking thoroughly alarmed.

  “The carpet has been stolen,” said Mr. Burton. “Just fifteen minutes ago. By local bandits. In my opinion they were Tatars.”

  “There wasn’t much we could do to prevent them,” said Mr. Swaraswati.

  “No, of course not,” said Nimrod. “Can’t be helped. These things happen.”

  “You’re taking this very calmly,” observed Moo. “How are we going to travel to Tibet without that carpet?”

  Nimrod frowned. “Am I? I certainly don’t mean to take it calmly.”

  “They were armed with guns,” said Mr. Prezzolini. “They threatened to shoot us unless we gave them the carpet.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not calm at all.” Nimrod shook his head. “Whatever gave you that idea? Because if there’s one thing I really hate, it’s a thief,” he said. “I get really angry about theft. If I wasn’t so tired I’d go after them myself and —” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably do something terrible, if you really want to know. Something really awful. I’d give them what for, that’s what I’d do. That’s what thieves deserve. Proper punishment. Real punishment instead of the smack on the wrist that the law gives thieves these days.”

  “To be fair, I think the punishment for thieves in Kazakhstan is a bit harder than it is in England,” said Moo.

  “Well, it’s probably still too good for them,” grumbled Nimrod. “Whatever it is.” Nimrod snorted. “Thieves? I’d skin them alive.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Philippa.

  “Go after them, of course,” said Nimrod. “Go after them and get the carpet back. What do you think we’re going to do? The Times crossword?”

  “You can see their tracks,” said Mr. Burton, pointing at the ground. “They should be easy to follow. They can’t have gone far in fifteen minutes.”

  Nimrod let out a sigh. “Philippa, you’ll have to do it. Go after them. I can’t. I’d probably overreact. You do it.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. You. Look, if you knew how I was feeling, you wouldn’t argue.”

  “But what shall I do when I catch up with them?” she asked.

  “Do?” Nimrod laughed. “Do? Light my lamp, child, you’re a djinn. What do you think you should do with someone who’s stolen your flying carpet? Cook them a cake or scare the skin off their feet? You scare them, of course. That’s what you do. And if that doesn’t work, then you do whatever seems horribly and poetically appropriate in the circumstances.”

  “Such as?”

  Nimrod shook his head, which was a mistake as it was still aching terribly. “Ow,” he said, wincing with discomfort. “My head. Talk about Jack and Jill. I don’t know, Philippa. Why ask me? You’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while now. You’ve read the Arabian Nights. You know what we djinns are capable of. Sometimes we just have to be cruel, I think. Especially to thieves. So do what your mother does. Boil them in oil. Drown them. Tie them to a railway line. Make them swallow rats. Set some wild animals on them. Better still, turn them into animals that other animals can eat, I suppose. They’re thieves. Just get that flying carpet back.”

  Philippa gave her uncle a look. Usually, he wasn’t as intolerant as this and she wondered if the blow on his head had affected him in some way. She pulled a face and started to follow the trail of the Tatar bandits.

  CHAPTER 36

  GETTING THE HUMP

  Mr. Bayuleev had lent Philippa one of his Bactrian camels so that she could go after the bandits in comfort. Unlike Dromedary camels, Bactrians have two humps, and as she climbed up onto the beast and settled herself between two enormous hairy pepper pots, she wondered which had come first in the evolutionary process: one hump or two.

  The camel walked quickly along the trail left by the Tatar bandits. They were on foot and their boot prints were clearly visible even from the height of the camel’s back, so they weren’t difficult to follow and Philippa was able to spend some of the time thinking about what she was going to do when she caught up with the bandits, which she soon did. But before she had arrived at a satisfactory answer to the problem of how she was going to deal with them, almost inevitably it seemed to her, they refused to return Nimrod’s carpet.

  There were three of them and they were easy to identify carrying Nimrod’s carpet on their broad shoulders like a long, saggy tree log. They wore sleeveless sheepskin jackets and all of them looked like the actor Charles Bronson, with narrow eyes, drooping mustaches, and salient cheekbones. They also wore pistols thrust under their belts.

  Seeing Philippa, they stopped for a moment and waited for her to say something.

  “Aye?” said one, which is Tatar for “yes.”

  “Excuse me.” Philippa smiled. “That’s my uncle’s carpet,” she said, “and he wants it back.”

  The Tatar leader smiled a big friendly smile. “Zinhar öçen,” he said. “Say please.”

  “Zinhar öçen.” Philippa shrugged. “Please.”

  The bandits thought that was very funny. Then one of them waved at her. “Saw buliğiz,” he said. “Bye-bye.”

  “No,” said Philippa, jumping down from the camel. “I can’t let you do that. Look, you can’t go around stealing things. It’s not right. If you don’t put that carpet down, I’m going to have to stop you. I’m asking you nicely, all right?”

  “Yuq,” said the leader and, since he shook his head as he said this, Philippa guessed, correctly, that “yuq” is the Tatar word for “no.”

  “Yuck, indeed,” she said. “I really hate this. Why won’t people listen?” She stamped her foot and raised her voice. “You’re not listening to me.”

  Blocking their way now, she said to the leader, “Look, I know you speak a bit of English.”

  “I speak English,” said the leader. br />
  “Good, because I want you to know that I’m not fooling around here.”

  “I not fooling around, also,” said the bandit leader. “I warn you to go away. Or maybe I take your camel as well as your uncle’s carpet.”

  “That would be an even bigger mistake than the one you made already,” said Philippa. “Please don’t make me use force. You’ve no idea what I’m capable of. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating me. Some other people did and now they’re budgies. Or at least they would be if some ferrets hadn’t eaten them. I don’t like using force. But if you give me no choice, then I will.”

  “Force? What kind of force?” He grinned. “Maybe you gonna hit me with your glasses, huh? Or slap my face?”

  “I can do much worse than that,” said Philippa. “But the thing is I don’t want to, you see?”

  The bandit leader sighed and it was clear he still didn’t believe Philippa could stop him, which was, she decided, hardly surprising since grown men have a bad habit of ignoring children, especially girls, and not taking them seriously. So she decided to make the carpet much heavier by the simple device of causing a length of solid cast iron weighing several hundred pounds to appear inside the rolled-up carpet. Which was the same moment she remembered that she’d forgotten to change the focus word back to something more easily usable.

  “DIDDLEEYEJOEFROMMEJICOFELLOFFHISHORSEATARODEOHANDSUPSTICKEMUPDROPTHEMGUNSANDPICKEMUPDIDDLEEYEJOEFROMMEJICO!”

  Immediately, the three bandits staggered and then collapsed under the heavy weight; then the carpet rolled off their shoulders and onto the ground.

  “I told you,” she said. “Now if you’ll just leave it there and walk away, nobody will get hurt. Or turned into an animal.”

  The bandit leader stood up holding his shoulder painfully and said something that even in Tatar sounded unpleasant to Philippa’s ears. Then he reached for his pistol.

  There was no time for her to think about anything except getting all of the focus word out of her mouth before the bandit could get his gun out of his belt; but even as he was thumbing back the hammer, Philippa still hadn’t finished uttering it. And he was actually pointing the pistol at her when the very last syllables crossed her lips.

  There was a loud bang and a strong smell of sulfur, as is often the result following an angry or urgent demonstration of djinn power. The bandit leader disappeared, and another Bactrian camel was now standing in his place.

  This prompted the second bandit to reach for his pistol, only he did it a little more quickly than his friend, which meant that he was able to get off a single shot that Philippa ducked, before she finally managed to utter all of her focus word again, and he, too, was turned into a burping, saliva-drooling Bactrian camel.

  It wasn’t that she liked Bactrian camels so much as the fact that, what with all these guns being pointed at her, there was little time to think of anything else but guns and camels. And she might just as easily have turned the bandit into an old service revolver of the kind that the bandit had been holding, except that she disliked camels just a little less than she disliked guns.

  “At this rate, I’m going to end up with my own camel train,” said Philippa.

  The third bandit was sufficiently alarmed by what had happened to his friends that he was not inclined to stay and offer Philippa any further resistance. He was quite convinced that Philippa was some kind of alien, or at the very least a Cossack devil of the kind his grandparents had told him about. He yelled with fright and quickly reached for his gun to throw it away.

  The trouble was that Philippa was unable to read his mind and assumed that he, too, was intending to shoot her, and before the pistol could hit the ground, there was a third Bactrian camel standing beside the other two.

  Philippa let out a weary sigh and felt sick. It wasn’t the fear of almost being shot that made her feel nauseous so much as the idea of turning a man into an animal. Having experienced being an animal herself, she knew this wasn’t so bad. All the same what she had done felt pretty drastic and, for a moment or two, she looked hard for a silver lining inside the cloud of what she had done.

  “They may be camels but at least they’re still alive,” she told herself. “Unlike those two budgies back in Bumby. Although it wasn’t really my fault that they got eaten by those two ferrets. How was I to know that ferrets eat budgies?”

  She found a length of rope on the back of Mr. Bayuleev’s camel and used it to tie the other three to the saddle.

  “And I suppose I can always make a gift of these other camels to Mr. Bayuleev in return for him helping us. He looks pretty poor. I guess three camels would be very valuable to him.”

  Then, using djinn power again, she made the length of cast iron inside the flying carpet disappear before lifting it up in the air and laying it across one of the bandit camels.

  “And I suppose that those three wicked bandits can’t rob anyone else now. Or worse. I mean, it is possible that they might have shot me. Equally they could shoot someone else. So I guess that has to be a good thing, too.”

  She mounted Mr. Bayuleev’s camel and started back to where she had left the others.

  “All the same, I can’t helping thinking that it still doesn’t feel right to do that to someone,” she said. “It feels cruel and unusual. Like something prohibited in the Constitution. And that has to be bad.”

  This feeling lasted as long as it took Philippa to arrive back at the collection of leather tents Mr. Bayuleev called home, because when she presented him with three extra camels he was so grateful he started to kiss her hand and to cry. And she began to feel that maybe something good had come out of what had happened after all.

  Nimrod, however, was less impressed.

  “I hope you terrified them properly first,” he said. “Before you turned them into camels.”

  “Of course I did,” said Philippa, hoping to change the subject.

  Nimrod looked disbelieving.

  “They don’t look like they’ve been terrified very much.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Go on then, what did you do?”

  “I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind.”

  “That’s because you didn’t do it, did you?” argued Nimrod. “Which makes me wonder why you turned them into camels.”

  “What’s wrong with camels?”

  “Nothing,” said Nimrod. “That’s my point, really. I mean, given that these were three desperate thieves with guns, and given that you couldn’t bring yourself to terrify them a bit first, couldn’t you have turned them into something a bit more horrible than camels?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Tortoises. Fish. Better still, gerbils. That way something would be bound to eat them before very long. Especially around here. Snow leopard. Eagle. Lynx. A gerbil’s a nice snack when you’re a lynx or an eagle. And serve them right, too. In my opinion, all thieves should squeak a bit for their crimes. Especially when they go around pointing guns at people. That’s only justice. Don’t you agree, Moo?”

  “I’ve never liked gerbils,” said Moo. “Or anything that squeaks. But I happen to believe in the rule of law. There can be no real justice without a trial.”

  “Well said, lady,” said Silvio.

  “If I hadn’t seen your X-ray,” said Philippa, “I’d swear there was something very wrong with you, Uncle Nimrod.”

  “I agree,” said Mr. Burton. “You’re behaving in a most peculiar way.”

  “I feel fine,” insisted Nimrod.

  “Anyway, I thought three camels would make a nice gift for Mr. Bayuleev.”

  “That’s fair enough, I suppose.”

  Nimrod chuckled as Mr. Bayuleev proceeded to kiss Philippa’s hand once again.

  “Bless him, look. He thinks you’re an angel. A real one, probably. Tell you what. I’ve had a great idea. Three camels, right? Why don’t you hang a bit of tinsel on them and maybe he’ll think it’s Christmas?”

  Nimrod laughed out loud at his
own rather tasteless joke, which left Philippa staring up at the sky and hoping that before very long another large bird might fall and hit her uncle on the head. Either that or she was going to have to get used to liking Nimrod a lot less than before.

  “Come on,” said Nimrod. “Let’s roll out that carpet and get out of here before he starts worshipping you and this gets really embarrassing.”

  Philippa shot her uncle a withering look. “Yes, well, I certainly know what that feels like,” she said.

  CHAPTER 37

  AUF WIEDERSEHEN

  It was midnight, for they were to leave before it was light, and the moon made everything in the Kailash crater a strange and unearthly shade of blue.

  At the Mopu Lamasery, the Nazis made their preparations to return home to Germany from Tibet with a cheerfulness that John found easier to understand than to share. They rolled up their flags, packed away their pictures and statues, and sang jolly German songs about how they loved to go wandering in the mountains (especially when they were in countries that belonged to other people), a man called Horst Wessel, and how someone’s rotten bones were trembling. Several of them grinned happily at John and clapped him on the shoulder. A few even thanked him for “agreeing” to accompany them to Berlin.

  “You’ve no idea what this means to us,” said one. “To go home. To see our families again after all this time. Seventy weeks in Tibet. It felt more like seventy years, I can tell you.”

  John didn’t have the heart to tell the Nazi that something had happened to time while he and his comrades had been staying in the Kailash crater; that seventy weeks had been at least seventy years, and that very likely all of their families were dead — either from old age or as a result of the Second World War, which none of them seemed to know about. So he kept his mouth shut and bided his time.

  Meanwhile, Hynkell kept his word and released Rakshasas, who sprang upon John in a frenzy of affection, licking his face and playfully biting his hand. John took hold of the thick collar of fur around the wolf’s neck and spoke quietly into his ear, explaining what had happened.