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  • The Snake Priest
  • Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky (bio)

1846. Ghara, Sind

He crouches in the dusty street among the beggars, wrapped in a tattered blanket, his face darkened with henna and his beard wild. It seems he is a blind man today, a faqir, a holy fool. I've seen him on other days as a merchant, selling rancid dates and ginger, cloth and sweetmeats from a shop in the bazaar, or as a wandering Arab in his skullcap and turban. Even, on occasion, as an Englishman, in his trousers and boots, sketching birds in the marshes along the river or measuring the channel's depth with a rope and stone. But today, he gazes about with sightless eyes, his head swaying slightly as if catching at scents and faint sounds on the fragrant air.

And yet, he's watching me closely. I sip my tea among graceful whores, seated on a rug in the garden, gazing out across the square from the shade of a tamarind tree. What does he see, I wonder? A Russian merchant, taking his ease in the evening after a day of small profits in a land where only a fool would expect more. But also a spy, scouting the routes through which an army of Cossacks might descend, as the newspapers in London and Delhi cry, to pluck this dusty, stolen jewel from his queen's crown. We all have our dreams. How disappointing it would be to think that the man he watches so closely might simply be wasting his life by wandering to strange lands, a habit as addictive as opium or these languorous whores.

He's right, of course. I am a spy. Each month I write out a report, spend a long evening laboriously transcribing it into a code taught to me by my masters in Saint Petersburg, then seal two copies into a packet of commercial papers that I dispatch on their long journey, one overland—by camel caravan through Quetta, Kandahar, Herat, Bokhara, Khiva, and on to Orenburg—the other by a Persian trading dhow that sails from Karachi up the Arabian Sea, then on by land through Shiraz [End Page 52] and Isfahan to our diplomatic mission in Teheran, from where it will be sent on by ship up the Caspian Sea to our outposts at Alesandrovsk and Guryev. So much heat and dust, I can't help thinking, so much starving on land and storm at sea, to carry my words back to you, my masters, in your cold palaces, so far away. It seems such a waste to report only the endless squabbles of tribal chieftains along the mountain passes, or the plotting of Englishmen who must travel to the far side of the world to set their imaginations free but then find themselves bored in these dusty garrison towns. Many months have passed, with little of real value to report. So, like many spies, I find myself unable to resist the temptation to improve on the facts as I write: I tell you, Allaho A'alem, what I've learned in the beds of whores and by listening in the bazaars. After all, what is an empire but an act of imagination, a great spilling of blood and ink?

My Englishman, he'd understand this. Or so I like to think. He is a man who loves disguises, wandering among the natives as a half-breed Arab, chattering to the merchants and beggars in their own tongue. Boor-ton, they call him. I can't help smiling as they speak his name. The other British officers call him Burton, with a faint air of disgust. Burr, I whisper to myself, imitating their pronunciation. Like the prickly seeds that stick to one's trousers after walking in the long grass.

He doesn't look like an Englishman—black eyes, like a gypsy, set deeply below fierce brows, and a nose that is sharp as a knife. One of the whores reports to me that he has had himself circumcised, like a Muslim, that he touches his forehead to the ground when he prays, squats when he pisses, washes himself with his left hand only, and that...

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