By the time we were correctly dressed, our barge was slanting towards the western bank where a group of dock-workers was already waiting. Mooring ropes were thrown and made fast, the barge scraped against the quay and the labourers swarmed aboard.
‘Please make sure that the ice bears are kept out of the sun,’ I said to their overseer. After the months of practising the Saracen tongue with Osric, I could make myself understood.
Madi and Modi were in a very sad condition. Walo had done his utmost to keep them healthy. He had fed them their favourite foods, given them plenty to drink, doused them with water almost hourly during the heat of the day. But the sapping heat had taken its toll. Both animals were emaciated. There were great hollows in their flanks. Their fur was lacklustre, a dingy yellow, and they spent hour after hour, slumped on the floor of their cage, barely moving, taking shallow breaths.
They did not even raise their heads as the dockers lifted up their cage with levers, slid rollers into place, and began to shift it off the barge.
‘Our reception committee seems very well prepared,’ I said to Abram. On the quay a stout, low trolley was already in position.
‘The barid, the caliph’s intelligence service, will have told them what to expect,’ he replied.
Walo, hovering beside the cage, was trying to explain something to the official in charge. Osric hurried off to help with translation.
‘The barid has eyes and ears everywhere. That’s how the caliph keeps his throne,’ said Abram, lowering his voice. ‘Be careful what you do and say.’
The shore gang was quickly on the move. At least twenty men hauled on ropes as they dragged the laden trolley away and down the nearest street. Behind them two men carried the gyrfalcons in their cages, and another group were leading the white dogs. Abram and I hurried after them.
Baghdad’s houses were set close together, scarcely an arm’s length apart, and they were a strange assortment. Some were modest in size, little more than cottages with small windows and sun-warped doors. The plaster on their walls was often patched and peeling. Other dwellings were far grander and larger, boasting intricately carved doors of oiled wood and outer walls decorated with patterns of coloured tiles in green, blue and yellow that glittered in the sunshine. All were single-storeyed and every house was built with a flat roof. Several times I saw people looking down at us, curious to see the little procession on its way past.
‘This is a mixed district,’ Abram explained. ‘Merchants, traders, shopkeepers and manual workers, all living side by side.’
I asked why there were so few people in the street.
‘It’s still too hot,’ he answered. ‘People prefer to stay indoors until the worst of the day’s heat is over. Even the homeless and the beggars try to find a spot of shade.’
‘So there are beggars even in wealthy Baghdad.’
The corners of his mouth turned down. ‘Beggars and vagrants by the thousand. While the caliph and his favourites live in unimaginable luxury, there are vast numbers of desperate poor. Often they are those who have flocked into the city, hoping to better their lives. That’s another reason why the caliph needs the barid’s eyes and ears. To be alert to any risk of mob riot.’
We walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile further, crossed a small bridge that spanned one of the canals that provided the citizens with water, and found ourselves confronted by a thirty-foot-high wall, topped with battlements. It needed no imagination to see why the caliph’s residence was called the Round City. The great wall trended away on each side in a smooth curve, a circular design unlike anything I had seen before.
Abram noted my reaction with a knowing smile. ‘Not like Rome with its conventional straight walls, is it?’ he said. ‘Caliph Mansour himself drew the initial outline of Baghdad in the ashes of his campfire. He sketched a circle, then jabbed his pointed stick in the centre. That spot, he told his architects, was where they were to put his palace so that he could be in the middle of all that was going on.’
I was finding the dragoman’s air of superiority irritating but had to admit that the great wall was impressive. The base was a full fifteen feet thick, and we passed through the iron gates of an imposing brick archway into a hundred feet of open space – a killing ground. Beyond was an inner wall, even higher and thicker than the first, and a second iron gate. If the city mob did riot, they stood little chance of gaining access to the royal household.
Once through the second gate we turned to our left, still following the bear cage on its trolley, and continued along the line of the inner wall past a long arcade of shops and stalls that, I presumed, supplied the needs of the palace staff. Ahead was a high, square building that I took to be an immense warehouse. Gatekeepers held open broad double doors and we went inside. The smell made me catch my breath. It was like walking into a vast, stuffy stable. Behind the familiar mix of dung and hay there was something else – sour, pungent and fetid. Large windows set high up pierced the thick walls. Shafts of sunlight illuminated a long central passageway floored with wood blocks, and on either side a long line of heavy wooden doors. Instantly, I was reminded of the place where we had kept our animals inside the Colosseum.
An extraordinary sound made me jump: a shrill trumpeting blast, part squeal, part bellow. Just ahead of me one of the doors creaked open a few inches, pushed from the inside. A loose chain prevented the door from opening any further. Out from the crack slithered a thick grey serpent. It waved in the air, menacingly. I jumped back with a frightened yelp.
The grey snake heard me and turned in my direction, reaching out towards me. I shrank away, shuddering. The head of the serpent was horrible. It had no eyes. Instead there were two slimy holes and above them a short fat finger that was moving up and down as if questing for me.
Abram guffawed. ‘Don’t be afraid. He’s just curious,’ he told me.
‘What is it?’ I blurted, still keeping well back from the serpent that now curled up and was withdrawing itself back through the gap in the door.
‘You’ll see in a moment,’ he replied, grinning broadly.
A little further on, the upper half of one of the doors was open. When we came level, I looked inside, and caught my breath. I was looking at the animal that I had longed to see – a live elephant. My only mild disappointment was that it was not quite as large as I had expected. The animal swayed gently on thick grey legs and flapped huge ears with ragged edges and patches of mottled pink skin. Then it reached up with the long flexible nose that I had mistaken for a serpent and felt inside the hay net hanging on the wall. It tore off a wisp and, curling back its trunk, put the hay into its mouth. It stood there, chewing meditatively and watching me with tiny, bright eyes. The creature was as wonderfully strange as I had imagined. I looked on, delighted.
‘Walo needs our help. We’d better hurry,’ said Abram.
Ahead of us the team hauling the bear cage had stopped in front of an open door. Walo was waving his arms, arguing with the overseer of the slave gang. I looked around for Osric who had been acting as Walo’s interpreter and saw that my friend had been distracted. He had found another half-open door and was peering over it at whatever creature was kept inside.
I hurried forward to help Walo. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘They want to put my bears in there,’ he said, casting an unhappy glance into what looked like a perfectly ordinary stall. It had clean straw on the ground, and a large tub of water. The only drawback was that the stall was ill-lit and gloomy.
Walo was very distressed. ‘Modi and Madi are very weak already. If they are put in there, they are likely to die. They must have fresh air.’
I translated what he had said to a small, grey-haired man who had appeared from further down the central aisle. I guessed he was the chief keeper of the menagerie.
He gave Walo a sympathetic glance. ‘Tell your friend not to worry,’ he said to me, ‘we’ll open shutters and allow fresh air to circulate as soon as the sun goes down. At this hour it is too hot outside for us to do that.’