What the Traveller Saw Read Online Free PDF Page B

standing stones which acted as stewardesses to ask the pilot, who up to now had not exactly been a mine of information so far as his passengers were concerned, at what speed we were travelling, information which he rather surprisingly provided. It was now possible to work out, longitudinally, the approximate position of my missile site/sewage farm, whatever it was. The military attaché at Kabul should be proud of his pupil, I thought. After all, it was he who when I was about to depart had gruffly told me to ‘keep my eyes skinned’ in case I saw anything interesting, and had provided me with a telephone number in London to ring if I did.
    At Moscow I was put up at the Embassy and was invited by the Ambassador (Sir William Hayter) to travel with him the following day to the monastery at Zagorsk to which he was taking Isaiah Berlin who was also staying on the premises. Foolishly, perhaps, I turned down this invitation. I wanted tosee Moscow and the Muscovites. An Orthodox monastery, however splendid, I felt, could wait. In the event it awaited me for more than twenty years, until 1977.
    The Embassy at this time had a particularly beleaguered air about it and the Ambassador said that until recently the only place where he could be reasonably sure of having a conversation without being overheard by the Russians was in the Embassy garden; but even this was now no good with the recent improvement in listening devices. Now the only really satisfactory thing to do was to wait until winter if one had something confidential to communicate when it could be done while skating with one’s confidant on some frozen lake – summer was no good, boats could too easily be bugged. What about bugged skates? I wondered.
    At Sacher’s Hotel in Vienna, where I had booked a room while still in Kabul, in spite of my outlandish appearance I was given a splendid double room with a sunken bath, approached by steps, that looked as if it might have been used by Rudolph when it was too damp to make love at Mayerling, and from it I sent Wanda a telegram. ‘Hotel Wonderful, come at once,’ I said, not realizing that she had not received my first cable from Moscow telling her which wonderful hotel she was to come to. After telephoning the tourist office in Vienna (whose staff might have displayed a little more initiative than they did by telephoning round one or two of the more wonderful Viennese hotels on her behalf) to ask the whereabouts of the Hotel Wonderful, she gave up and waited for me to appear at Trieste.
    At this time (the autumn of 1956) Vienna had only recently ceased to be an occupied city, the Treaty restoring Austrian independence having only been signed in May the previous year, and its walls were still covered with allied military graffiti. Otherwise there was little outward sign, except for a certain threadbareness, that it had been occupied for ten years.
    The Habsburgs still dominated the city. What they hadmade and what they stood for was everywhere, above and below ground, embalmed and in the spirit. In the Imperial Vaults, the Kaisergruft, there were 138 of them sealed up in giant catafalques and sarcophagi, one of which weighed eight tons, row upon row of them, as if in some funereal bedding department; dead from suicide, murder, assassination, the firing squad and natural causes, presided over by Franz Josef II, the penultimate Habsburg, who died in bed. The hearts of forty-nine of them were in the Augustiner-kirche. Their intestines, which in life they cosseted at the sulphur springs at Baden, were in St Stephen’s. Their dull, nineteenth-century furniture was in enfilades of rooms in the Hofburg. Their jewels and regalia and those of the Holy Roman Empire in its Secular Treasury: the Imperial Crown made for the coronation of Otto the Great in 962, the Orb, the Holy Lance and the Inalienable Heirlooms, the Agate Bowl and the Unicorn, representing the mystical element in medieval kingship which the splendid objects in the