I declined, and at that moment there arrived half a dozen rather worn-looking tourists, clearly just off a long flight, most of them American it seemed, and ushered by a tour guide in Havian rig. I hastily left, but lingered for a few moments by the door, to hear Yazin say, in his fruity official voice: ‘Welcome, welcome. Before your helicopter takes you to enjoy yourselves at our great resort, I am so happy and privileged to be able to tell you something about an exciting new initiative that we are embarking upon here in Hav…’
I left, closed the door quietly behind me, and returned to the Bazaar for another coffee.
When I returned to the Roof-Race office Yasar was outside waiting for me. How did the recitation go, I asked him?
‘It went. They loved it. I know it by heart,’ and as we walked out of the Medina to the car park he added: ‘They always love it. Who wouldn’t? One of them said the Messenger sounded a bit like Robin Hood — oh, and one of them said they’d read about it in your book. I didn’t know you’d written a book? I hope I don’t come into it.’
Fortunately for me we reached the car park then — and fortunate for me too, I could not help thinking, that my book was banned…
His car was a trim little Honda Type R (built at their new Izmir factory, he said) and the minute he swung it out into the highway I knew I was in for a sharp ride. We whizzed — his word! — round the foot of the Castle on to the H1, and then up past the airport. Before the Havberry plant we turned off, and then we were on a rough road that went through the salt-flats towards the old Palast. This, he said, was where his rally route began.
I thought it seemed more suitable for motorbikes than for cars, but no, no, no, he said, not necessarily, and suddenly he put his foot down and we leapt over the flats leaving a vast cloud of sandy salty dust billowing behind us. There was no other traffic on the track — the big salt-wagons, he said, had their own tarmac road down the coast to the harbour — and the only signs of life were trucks moving among the flats and the big grey salt elevators steaming. This would only be the preliminary phase of the event, Yasar told me, and all too soon it was over, and we were bounding and bouncing up the first slopes of the Escarpment.
Here were the caves of the Kretevs. They were lifeless. Nobody was there. Not a tumble-down lorry stood about, no raggedy swarm of children ran after us, no bright washing hung from laundry lines. ‘No bears,’ I said as we bounced and joggled over the hard bumps.
‘No bears, no Kretevs, no snow raspberries, no life. That’s what the Intervention did to us. Only these holes in the ground.’
They did look like holes, too, like rabbit warrens perhaps, or abandoned badger setts, with the same scrabbled signs of old activity around them. I found it hard even to imagine the curious community that used to be there, so full of life and love, with their cosy troglodyte homes and their weird relationship with the bears. Could any of their tradition survive, I wondered, among the comfortable conformities of the new Balad? And then I remembered what the women had said about the guest workers, and thought that perhaps all was not lost…
Yasar seemed to have read my mind. ‘Don’t fret,’ he said, grimly clutching his bucking steering-wheel and desperately changing gear around corners — his paunch made it a little difficult. ‘Don’t you worry, the Kretevs will find a way. They always have.’
We did not stop when we reached the top of the ridge, high above the sea to our left. Instead we raced down to the flat ground on the other side, and then, turning to the east, made an exhilarating run at top speed along the northern lee of the Escarpment — thirty miles or so along the tussocky moorland, flying over mounds and declivities, swooping around bumps, with such a roar and a rattling and a whoosh that Yasar was laughing aloud beside me. ‘I call that the Frontier Run,’ he said at last, breathlessly braking the car to career around a rock. ‘We’ve been following the old frontier all the way. Now back to the station.’
We turned in our tracks to run westward along the flank of the ridge, and soon I saw where we were. All alone there stood the remains of the Frontier Station, where the Express used to stop to pick up the Tunnel Pilot, and where I had first met the young Yasar. It looked picked clean, as it were. The roof and gates and platform shelters had all gone. So had the railway lines. It might never have been a railway station at all, and it looked as though nobody had been there for years. ‘Sometimes I see Kretevs here,’ Yasar said. ‘God knows what they’re up to. They scare me rather — they look like ghosts.’
He swung the car into the cutting where the railway had run, stopped, and switched off the engine. Now the only sound was the ticking of its engine cooling, and the rush of the wind. ‘Look up there,’ Yasar said, pointing to the top of the Escarpment before us. I looked, I looked hard, and I could just make out, like a careless stroke of pencil lead in a drawing, a thin black line silhouetted against the sky. It was the Megalith, the high point of the old Staircase, from where I had looked back, all those years before, to see the warships of the Intervention approaching. In my mind I could see the scene as if it were yesterday. I could almost hear the blast of those black aircraft, heralding the change of all things in Hav.
‘Right,’ said Yasar then. ‘The tunnel run.’ Revving the engine hard, he slipped the clutch and we shot helter-skelter into the darkness. The Hav Tunnel, built by Roman Abramoff of the Imperial Russian Railways, used to be famous as the most daring feat of railway engineering ever undertaken, because it descended (or ascended) such a startling distance in so short a time. It avoided a precipitate surface gradient by a series of a dozen or more hairpin bends, so close together that they amount in fact to a spiral. ‘Nothing like this had ever been attempted before’, said Branger’s Railway Engineering in 1878, ‘and will probably never be tried again. It was Abramoff’s final tour de force.’ And when Norman Foster’s celebrated Millau Viaduct was opened in France in 2005, even then the Civil Engineering Gazette declared it to be reminiscent, in its sheer technical virtuosity, of Abramoff’s Hav Tunnel.
This was the prodigy we now threw ourselves into, in our little Honda, and no train ever descended those loops so fast. It was pitch-black in the tunnel, except for the beams of our headlights, eerily sweeping the rock walls, and the noise of our engine was deafening, echoing all around us and reverberating, I imagine, back through all the bends behind us and up to the tunnel mouth. Neither of us spoke. Like a projectile we plunged down the inside of that mountain, with never a glimpse of daylight ahead. Once a bird, startled by the noise and the headlights’ beams, sprang from the wall with a frenzied flutter of its wings and disappeared into the gloom. Sometimes I felt we were twirling, like a bullet in a rifle barrel, and this sensation recalled to me the moment, only a day or two before, when we had suddenly been hurled upwards in Car 7 of the Myrmidon Tower.
The two experiences oddly merged in my mind. Both journeys, one in the light, one in the darkness, seemed somehow paradigmatic of a journey through Hav itself. The absolute nature of both, something gravelike about them, was like Hav’s blanketing enigma. The solitary bird of the tunnel, the myriad bright fish of the Tower, suggested impotent reminders of life. It was a bit like being buried alive. Even my companions were a little disturbing in their charm. Something about Biancheri made me feel uncomfortable. Something about Yasar was evasive. Was it Yasar in the Tower, Biancheri in the Tunnel? The bird in the aquarium, the fish coming out of the rock? It took us only five minutes or so to rush through that tunnel, but it seemed to me that all the nagging ambiguities of Hav, all the unanswered questions, swirled around my head as the car swirled through the darkness.