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    Dung and diplomacy
    One day I walked up to the royal palace in Brussels, and just as I arrived a plenipotentiary emerged from its gates in a big black car after a diplomatic presentation to the King of the Belgians. A footling squadron of cavalry awaited him in the ceremonial square outside. Its officers wore romantic white cloaks. Its troopers, in slightly cockeyed bearskins, as in musical comedies, included some sceptical-looking horsemen of the old-sweat school, and at least one rosy-cheeked woman. When they clattered and bounced away with the ambassadorial Cadillac, a municipal road-sweeping truck came trundling around the place where they had mustered, cleaning up the horse shit. Its driver told me he spent hisdays doing it. There were so many embassies, missions and international institutions in Brussels, he said, that the palace cavalry was always at it–and sure enough, as he spoke, the horsepersons, having disappeared round the corner with their fluttering lances, came ridiculously back again with another couple of limousines.
    Steamboat Gothic
    Longwood is the oddest of the mansions of Natchez, Mississippi, where Southern myth and prejudice are very powerful. The house was begun shortly before the Civil War, a wild architectural extravaganza, and Northern workmen were brought in to work upon it. Soon after the war began they dropped their tools and left, leaving the house unfinished to this day, with their hammers and wheelbarrows and paintboxes still lying about, ladders propped against walls, scaffolding still in place. Octagonal, domed and balconied, it stands in a wooded garden as a grotesque monument of Steamboat Gothic, its glassless windows gaping. Only the ground floor is inhabitable, and in it there lives all alone Mr John Price, white-haired and nearsighted, who once entertained us to a very enjoyable lunch.
    This was a feat, for he seems usually to live entirely on marshmallows and fig rolls, but a jolly cousin of his came in to do the cooking, and the results were capital. Mr Price had no tablecloth handy, but a sheet on the table served just as well, and we ate Southern fried chicken in enormous quantities, and blancmange and cheese, finishing with either fig rolls or marshmallows, I forget which.
    War story
    An Australian boy once told me that his father had recently taken part in a military parade. ‘What kind of a hat did he wear?’ I asked for something to say. One of those hats, he replied, which were flat on one side but turned up in the other. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘like they used to wear in the Great War.’ There was a silence for a moment, and then the boy spoke. ‘I hate the Great War,’ he said, and my heart turned.
    Chinese jingles
    Early in a performance I attended in one of the regime’s Children’s Palaces, by an orchestra of children under the age of five, the virtuoso lead xylophonist happened to get herself a full tone out of key. She never appeared to notice. Nor did any of the other performers, all dimples, winsome smiles and bobbing heads up there on the stage. On they went in fearful discord, tinkle-tinkle, clang-clang, simpering smugly to the end.
    At El Kharga
    El Kharga is one of the five isolated oases which lie well to the west of the Nile in the Egyptian desert, and it has always been a place of exile. Nestorius was banished there, and Athanasius too, it is said. In our time political prisoners are immured in a detention camp at the oasis, and I once encountered some of them. They were patients in the localhospital, lying on straw palliasses on the floor of a bare ward. A murderous lot they looked, all the more sinister because bandages and plasters covered their eyes and supported their limbs–one and all were enemies of the state, and their interrogations had not been easy. I talked to them warily of this and that, the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release, and they told me that every morning