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I somehow think you will do.’ Then he proceeded to devise a most impressive document, all red ribbons and massive seals and flourishing signatures, in which concoction he took a fatherly pride. So now I simply cannot allow myself to be murdered in Afghanistan!
    Half an hour later I was back in the Afghan Embassy, waving the Ruritanian-looking scroll with ill-concealed triumph. Not surprisingly, it worked. No one was happy at the thought of me being granted a visa, but since another state had nobly elected to hold the baby they gloomily agreed – against their better judgement, underlined – to give the lunatic her head. However, Kabul has to be contacted so I won’t have everything signed, sealed and delivered until the 30th; but I’m too elated tonight to fuss about another few days’ delay.
TEHERAN, 28 MARCH
    At a party yesterday evening I met three Pakistani officers – a general, a brigadier and a colonel – who are here on a three-months’ military mission and who immediately took me under their collective wing. They are all Pathans and are the first people I’ve met who do not expect me to be murdered in Afghanistan. For this, among other reasons, I find their company singularly congenial; being generally regarded as something next door to a corpse becomes tedious after a while. Acting on their cheerfully original assumption that I will eventually cross the Khyber Pass in one piece, they have advised me on which parts of Pakistan are most worth seeing and have given me a list of addresses of their friends and relatives all along my route. Colonel Jahan Zeb went to enormous trouble to plan an itinerary for me, which included a detour to the Tribal Territory of Gilgit, so now all is set fair for Pakistan and I’m assured I’ll have the Army behind me there – which is quite something in a country now run by the Army!
TEHERAN, 29 MARCH
    On leaving Constantinople, where one spends a small fortune on beggars, I had resolved to give nothing to anyone during the rest of the journey lest I end up with a begging-bowl myself. But of course Persia has undermined that resolution: the pathetic wretches seen here simply can’t be ignored. (Many of them in the towns and villages are lepers diagnosed too late for treatment – even if treatment were available in their area, which it often isn’t – and left to die slowly at home.) So now I’ve got the problem worked out systematically. I reckon that by being a guest at my friend’s house I’m saving £1 a day, which I distribute as baksheesh. This obviously is an oblique form of selfishness; one couldn’t come home after a walk through Teheran and settle down to enjoy the luxuries of Capitalism if one hadn’t done something, however trivial, to alleviate the surrounding misery. Yet it’s well to remember that this misery is not as total or as neglected as it appears to be. One of the religious duties of Muslims – as of Christians – is to give alms to the needy and the vast majority of Muslims of every sect regularly fulfil this duty in proportion to their means. In effect the citizens of these countries provide for their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the working men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggars voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumblingly paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.
    Similarly, the bribery which is so rife here, is