Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎45r] (89/118)

at Isfahan, and make my highlight a camp-bed night in the cool open desert
between Kerman and Yezd which I would remember both in the furnance-hot air
near Ahwaz (where oil company folk quoted temperatures outdoing Death Valley,
California) and when I took the camp-bed out again, with the caretaker's
permission, for a night on the highest point of Krak des Chevaliers. By then I
had visited Ur, Babylon, Bagdad, Palmyra and Baalbek but would, alas, have no
time for Jerash and Petra if Pyramids, Sphinx and mosques were to be seen and
justice done to my Arabic studies. The fine things I saw relieved and compensated
the asperities of the Gulf and the rigours of driving in summer heat.
It was in Beyrouth on my return that by chance I met an officer in a
restaurant who took further a rumour I had seen only hinted at in unconfirmed
intelligence reports. An unmarked British aircraft had flown, unobserved until
the very last moment, to Qashqai territory near Farrashband and photographed a
hitherto undiscovered landing ground with markings showing that a plane was shortly
expected to land. The evidence of Nasir Khan Qashqai's complicity with the
Germans was now no longer hearsay.
In June, 1944 my return to Bushire was anticlimax after the tonic stimulus of
amphibious life among naval convoys, sub-chasing planes, coast watchers, trigger-
happy Middle Eastern commandos, death-wishing Russian aerobats, pirates, smugglers
and slavers. If a modern traveller* bucks the trend of predecessors (who never,
he says, 'write a word in favour of Bushire') by declaring it a 'mildly tropical
version of Wimbledon Common', he might still understand that I would have found any
Common rather dull. There was of course the pleasure of seeing colleagues again:
Sir Geoffrey Prior, John Howes (Secretary to the Resident) and Joan, his wife.
£
There was still Qashqai-watching to be done as the^served bhg-Fr pro-German
K
leanings - this time the story was of an American officer reaching Shiraz clad only
Sir Roger Stevens: "The Land of the Great Sophy",p.258. Methuen 1962.