East of Suez

East of Suez Read Online Free PDF

Book: East of Suez Read Online Free PDF
Author: Howard Engel
the French people down there don’t pronounce it.” I tried the name on my tongue. “I’ve got the right guy! I’ve got a feeling.” She was almost smiling.
    “Was your selection of Jake to be the father of your children another of those feelings? Never mind. Will I need a visa to get there? I’m going to have to see if my passport’s still valid. If it’s not, there’s that friend of my cousin, Melvin, in Ottawa. He may be able to speed things up.”

BOOK TWO

THREE
    IT TOOK ME the better part of three and a half weeks to pack and to get my papers in order—the visas took longest. When my cousin’s friend in Ottawa failed me, Anna’s father, a wellconnected retired businessman and on more Canadian and Ontario boards of directors than I have delinquent accounts, got me a valid passport in less time than it took me to get a pair of pants into the cleaners and out again. I considered buying a pith helmet, but thought that I could pick one up cheaper on the other side.
    A dusty geography book with my mother’s maiden name in it, found among my old schoolbooks in the cellar of my parents’ house, had a quarter of a page devoted to Miranam. It was lumped in with a three-page treatment of the whole of Southeast Asia, including The East Indies . Miranam appeared next to Siam and Burma, on the Malay Peninsula. The rainfall was over sixty inches a year. Burma? I hadn’t heard it mentioned in years. The map put Miranam north of the Federated Malay States. It mentioned the French rulers and warned that many of the people there were Taoists, who believed that there “are all sorts of evil spirits which man must fear and propitiate.” The local products were given as “rubber, rice, sugar-cane, exotic fruit, tapioca, coffee, spices, gums, and cotton.” Something about the book made me check further. The same tome gave the United States a population of one hundred and thirty million and England thirty-eight million souls. I looked for a date at the front of the text, but couldn’t find one. The price, which was given, was almost as good: fifty cents ! The book was seventy years out of date.
    A more up-to-date atlas added to the list: zinc, tin, rare wood, coal, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and gold. This book also told me that Burma had vanished like Siam and Upper and Lower Canada. Miranam is a former French colony. Its capital, Takot, has a population of a third of a million. Until the French pushed their way through the great Iron Gates of the capital in 1865, at the head of three hundred hussars, lost without their horses, but backed by a gunboat in the excellent deep-sea harbor, Miranam had maintained almost hermetic independence from its neighbors as well as from the great powers. Zeno Charpentier, a great nephew of Napoleon III, governed the colony until the eve of the Great War. His assassination, unfortunately upstaged by a similar event in Sarajevo a week earlier, caused little stir, either locally or internationally, except at the Élysée Palace. During the Second World War, the place was overrun by the Japanese, who introduced the least-respected of their customs. The Takot merchants, after three years under the heel of the military, opened the Iron Gates for the retreating invaders to welcome the U.S. Marines a week later. Metal miniatures of the landing of Admiral Halsey in his launch are for sale in gift shops at Takot International Airport. Everywhere along Ex-Charpentier Avenue, the chief commercial street leading up from the harbor to “the hill,” stand the monuments to imperial highwater marks—this is the neighborhood of the former great houses, now turned into embassies, private clubs, and gambling casinos.
    I made detailed notes about the flight—the landings at Vancouver, Tokyo, and Bangkok—but I’ve been told politely that they sound like any other plane trip. So I’ve left that part out. My tale starts again when the plane touched down at Takot International Airport. By then,
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