A minute later the other woman, who was older and strongly resembled de Pombal, joined them and took the girl over from Roger, as the Marquis said, 'Monsieur le Colonel, my sister, the Senhora Anna dc Arahna.' By then the whole company had crowded round and it was suggested that the young lady should be escorted back to the tents. But she had suffered no harm at all, and rallied surprisingly quickly after her faint. Smiling first at her aunt, then at Roger, she said:
'I fainted only from fright, and if we put off going over the ruins until later, the sun will roast us to our marrow bones. I shall be under no disability if this gallant gentleman who risked his life to save mine will give me his arm.'
Surprised and delighted, Roger returned her smile. 'Senhorita, you overwhelm me. I could ask no greater reward than the pleasure of escorting you.'
Almost simultaneously with the Ambassador there had arrived upon the scene a tall, dark, beetle-browed man of about thirty. At the Senhorita's request for Roger's arm, his face had taken on a sullen look; but he swiftly hid his annoyance when the Marquis introduced him as Senhor Don Alfonso de Queircoz, First Secretary of the Embassy.
Roger duly presented General Gardane and the other French officers to the four Portuguese, while the grooms tethered the horses in the shade thrown by the lofty platform on which the Palace stood. Then the Senhora de Arahna, with her brother on one side of her and Gardane on the other, led the way along to a steep ramp, which led up to the first of many lofty flat-topped gateways.
The carvings on these gateways had been only partially blurred by time. Most of them had on one side pairs of huge, mythological beasts, and on the other pairs of human heads, with curly beards and high, conical hats that looked like those of Assyrians. About the main hall of the Palace there were still standing several sixty-foot-high pillars. In the vast sunken Treasury only the stumps of the pillars which had supported the roof remained, but there were scores of them, covering an area that in itself would have provided a large enough ground space for the Palace of any minor King. Yet the most impressive sight provided by the ruins was several very broad staircases with shallow steps. On both sides they were flanked by carved reliefs of a procession of men, each bearing some object: a jar of wine, a dish of fruit, a dead gazelle, a string of pearls and so on. They were the twenty-eight Kings bringing tribute to their overlord Darius who, from their subjugation, took his title: King of Kings.
As they walked slowly round, Roger and his breathtakingly lovely companion found that they could converse quite easily in a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese and French. He learned that her name was Lisala and that, three years earlier, her father had taken her from her convent outside Lisbon to accompany him to Persia. Apart from its extremes of climate, she liked the country and admired its people for their pride in their own civilisation and for placing such a high value on all forms of art. But she found life there monotonous owing to the social limitations.
There were many feasts and jollifications with exciting displays of juggling, horse-racing, wrestling, polo and so on; but the European population of Isfahan consisted only of a handful of merchants and occasional travellers. The Portuguese, Dutch and Russians, alone among the Western nations, had Embassies permanently established there, so she was almost entirely deprived of the pleasures that a young woman of her age and station had, she felt, a right to expect.
Ingenuously she went on to say, 'One cannot have a love affair with a Persian, a Turk or an Afghan. Alfonso de Queircoz is mad about me, of course, but I do not find him attractive. Since Prince Galitzin left the Russian Embassy six months ago, there has not been a man in the whole city whom I should be pleased to have my hand, let alone aught else. That is why this is such a happy day for me. I hope I shall see a lot of you.'
Staggered as he was by her frankness, Roger appreciated the reason for it. At the age she had left Lisbon she would normally have been about to be married off; so by now would probably be the mother of one or more babies, queening it in the highest society, with a dozen handsome beaux seeking her favours. He was fully conscious of his own good looks; but not so vain as to suppose that, in Lisala's unusual situation, she would not have regarded any personable man who came into her life as manna in the desert. He could only render his thanks to the Goddess of Fortune that it was he, and not one of the attractive junior officers of the mission, who had had the luck to save her from breaking her beautiful neck. He had been favoured by a splendid start over all those youngsters who were coming up with the caravan and, in due course, would meet Lisala, and he was determined not to lose it.
Resorting quite unscrupulously to the oldest gambit in the game of love, he pressed her arm gently and said, 'Senhorita, our meeting today was pre-ordained. For a long time past I, too, have suffered from a terrible loneliness. My wife died in childbirth'—which was true enough, although that had happened some twelve years before—'and since then I have come upon no-one who I feel could expunge the memory of her from my mind'—which was a thumping lie. 'But the moment I looked into your lovely face, it was as though a new sun had risen on the horizon of my life.'
'Can that be true ?' she murmured.
'Indeed it is,' he assured her; and as he said it he really meant it. 'Moreover, although I am attached to this mission, I am not strictly of it. I am an aide-de-camp and friend of the Emperor whom I have known intimately for many years; and a Commander of the Legion d'Honneur. I tell you this not out of boastfulness, but simply to let you know that General Gardane has no power to send me off, as he might any of the others, on some special assignment. My time is my own, to do with as I will; so, when we return to Isfahan I shall count myself blessed if you will allow me to see you frequently, and place myself entirely at your service.'
By this time the party had spent an hour wandering round the ruins, marvelling diat, over two thousand years ago, an Eastern Monarch should have had architects and craftsmen capable of building him a palace with loftier halls and more spacious staircases than those at Versailles. To have fully explored the whole area, with its avenues of strange beasts and innumerable scenes of Court life in the distant past carved on tall walls, would have taken half a day; but it was already well after nine o'clock, and the sun was climbing swiftly in the blue vault of the heavens. As they had yet to see the Royal Tombs, which lay some four kilometres distant, the Ambassador and the General agreed that it would be as well to set off there without further delay.
Mounting their horses, the party rode for a quarter of an hour along a track below the towering mountain barrier, until they reached the tombs. That of Cyrus the Great was in the form of a seven-step pyramid surmounted by a thirty-foot-high burial chamber; but those of Darius the Great, Xerxes and several of their relatives were man-made caves hewn out of the cliff, their entrance being fifty feet above ground level, so inaccessible. They had elaborately-carved doorways, above which were scenes from the lives of their occupants, and much lower down, other scenes: one of outstanding interest, as it portrayed Darius on a very small horse, but with an enormous head-dress, accepting the surrender of the Roman Emperor Valerian, whose legions he had defeated, kneeling before him.
By ten o'clock, both parties were back at the small house among the trees, where they had first seen one another. The encampment of tents near it had been brought from Isfahan by the Ambassador, for to have made the journey to Persepolis and back in one day would have placed too great a strain on his ladies, and they had slept there the previous night. One was a fair-sized marquee, to feed and relax in, and he invited the French officers to accept his hospitality there. Extra supplies were bought from the family that occupied the little house near by, and they all settled down to enjoy themselves.