Free A Writer's World by Jan Morris Page A

the track. The railway workers did not want His Imperial Majesty to see this evidence of their ineptitude. Desperately they worked to put the engine on the track again, or at least on its wheels, as the royal train sped down the line towards them. But they failed to move it an inch, and only just in time hit upon a spaciously Persian solution. They buried it.
    Persia’s ambiance is pungent and defensive – as distinctive a national flavour, perhaps, as any on earth – and the foreigner is easily absorbed by it. In the vaults of the Central Bank of Persia, in Tehran, are kept the Crown Jewels, an astonishing collection of gems and objets d’art which provide backing for the national currency. They have been assembled over several royal generations, and are rich in spoils of war, begemmed weapons, enormously expensive baubles and gifts from other kingly dynasties. Kept in a huge underground strongroom seething with plain-clothes men, the collection has become a great tourist attraction.
    I was down there one crowded weekday morning, among the blue-rinsed coiffures and jangling charm bracelets of my fellow marvellers, when I came across an agreeable case of brooches and little jewelledwatches – more to my scale, I thought, than the colossal diamonds and tiered crowns that set the general tone of the exhibition. I stooped to examine these ornaments more closely, and as I did so the treasure-house suddenly reverberated with the ear-splitting blast of an alarm hooter. Everyone froze. Not a word was spoken. Not a pixie-charm tinkled. We waited aghast for the sound of splintered glass, gunshots, handcuffs or explosions. The hooter went on hooting. For a moment nothing else happened: then a smart young woman in green walked with composure across the room. She avoided the case containing the Gika of Nadir Shah, with its diamond ornaments of bayonets and gun-barrels around a monumental emerald. She ignored the sceptre presented to Reza Shah by the people of Azerbaijan, with its gold lions rampant around a jewelled globe. She took no notice of the Sea of Light, sibling to the Koh-i-Noor, inherited from the first Mogul emperor of India by way of the treasury of the Qajar tribe. Instead she walked calmly, with a loud clicking of her heels, directly across the vault to me.
    ‘May I please ask you’, she said with an amiable smile, ‘to remove your elbow from that metal bar around the jewel-case?’ I moved my arm. The hooter stopped. She thanked me. I kicked the last sand over the buried railway-engine, and the glory of Persia proceeded.
Oman
    In the winter of 1955 the Sultan of Muscat and Oman, a faithful client of the British Empire, decided with London’s encouragement to establish his authority over the disputed interior of his country, the Omani part, which he had never visited and where it was hoped there might be oil. It would entail a royal journey across the south-east corner of Arabia that had never been made before, starting from Salalah on the Arabian Sea, where the Sultan had his southern palace. I went along with the Sultan as representative of The Times , the only European among the Beduin guides and Nubian slaves of the enterprise – for Muscat and Oman then was one of the most shuttered states on earth, and slavery as an institution still existed. I later wrote a book about our journey, called Sultan in Oman.
    In the courtyard of the palace there stood a stubby, powerful American truck, piled high with baggage, and beside it the Sultan stopped and unfolded the map. I stood over him, taller by a foot or more, and examinedhis face while he pointed out the route to me. He was only 44, but the voluminous dignity of his robes, his stately bearing, his heavy turban and his luxuriant beard all combined to make him look much older. His eyes were large, dark, long-lashed and very serious. His mouth, though kindly and humorous, looked to me capable of an occasional sneer, and often seemed to act independently of the rest of