The Hidden Treasure
" That is nothing," said he. Many worse things, he
seemed to say, might happen in the immediate future.
Meanwhile the police had finished their enquiries. The
lieutenant was striding up towards my tent with an official
air, arranging his curved sword at a military angle as he came,
prepared to exert in its full force the majesty of Law. It was
a delicate moment. I greeted him with as ceremonious a
composure as I knew how, and motioned him to a seat on the
far corner of my carpet: the tent, I meant to imply, was mine
for the time being, but he was a welcome guest: the lieutenant,
though he had other ideas on the subject, could not very well
express them. He bowed in a provisional manner and began
to ask questions.
Having tracked us for three days across the solitudes of
Pusht-i-Kuh from Husainabad, where, as I had feared at the
time, the ill-omened wedding guests spread the report of our
journey, the lieutenant of police felt certain that the very last
thing we should have in our possession would be a passport.
Else why were we here, unannounced and unknown? When,
of my own free will, I asked him whether it would not interest
him to see our papers, he began to be surprised.
He had obviously been pondering in his mind how to inform
anyone as polite as I was that he had come to take me into
custody. He accepted my passport with a beginning of
doubt in his manner. It was in perfect order, and had been
signed at the frontier by Persian officials. Shah Riza's
document, rather more surprisingly, was in perfect order too.
Shah Riza, it is true, showed a deplorable nervousness over it,
but that might easily be attributed to the merely general effect
in Persia of anyone who is an official on anyone who is not.
The lieutenant studied the document from every angle: said
it was very peculiar: wondered that we had been allowed to
cross at so lonely and unusual a part of the frontier, and