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should be deprived of the opportunity of worshipping Him who is the creator of us all.’
    As I left the house the predicant clasped my arm, rather in the Rotarian manner, and pointed across the street outside, where an elderly black woman was hobbling out of a shop, screaming something in a searing treble over her shoulder. She crossed the pavement, closed one nostril with her finger and emptied her nose noisily into the gutter. Then, wiping her nose with her skirt, she turned round, still screeching, and disappeared indoors.
    â€˜You see?’ said the predicant. ‘My dear friend, we are not unkindly, but you must live among them to understand the Truth.’
    Social status in the people’s dictatorship
    Mrs Wang had invited me to lunch at her Shanghai apartment, but it gave me no culture shock. True, we ate eggs in aspic, a kind of pickled small turnip and strips of a glutinous substance which suggested to me jellified seawater, and Mrs Wang evoked for me her hysterectomy by acupuncture (‘When they slit me open, oh, it hurt very bad, but after it was very strange feeling, very strange …’)–nevertheless her home seemed to me the bourgeois home par excellence. It had the statutory upright piano, a picture of two kittens playing with a ball of wool, a bookshelf of paperbacks and a daily help. It had a daughter who had come over to help cooklunch, and a husband away at the office who sent his regards. ‘We are very lucky,’ said kind Mrs Wang. ‘We have a certain social status.’
    Baleful eyes
    No infidel is allowed to enter the most celebrated shrine of Kerbala, the holy city of the Shias in Iraq, but I knocked at the door of a neighbouring house and asked if I might climb to its roof to see into its courtyard. The owner of the house was all smiles, but it turned out to be a simple inn, catering for pilgrims from Iraq, and as I walked up its narrow winding staircase I found myself passing a series of sparsely furnished rooms–a bed and a prayer mat and a hard cold floor. In each of these doorless cells there was a pilgrim, and as I climbed my way up those steep steps each turned his baleful eyes in my direction. I shall never forget the detestation that overcame the faces of those merciless old men when they observed an infidel on the stairs, nor the relief with which at last I escaped the gamut of their loathing and emerged upon the roof, with the golden dome of the mosque in front of me and the wide sunlit courtyard, crowded with robed pilgrims, spread before me like a chessboard.
    Passing the nut
    I was trekking alone between Namche Bazaar and Thangboche, in the Nepali Himalaya. I was walking fast, in pleasant heathland country, and presently I saw far ahead ofme another solitary figure, moving in the same direction. It was a robust Sherpa woman, wearing long aprons and a high embroidered hat. Despite her hampering skirts she, too, was making good time, striding firmly along the track, but gradually I overhauled her until, in a narrow bend of the path, I was able to overtake her.
    She had given no sign that she knew of my presence, never turning round or looking over her shoulder, just ploughing steadily on like a colourful battleship. As I passed her, however, her left hand suddenly shot into mine. For a moment we touched. Neither of us spoke, and I was too surprised to stop, but I felt some small hard object pass from her hand into mine.
    I looked down to see what it was, passed so strangely from traveller to traveller, and found it was a small brown nut. When I turned round to thank her for it, she grinned and nodded and waved me on; so I pushed ahead up the hill, cracking its shell between my teeth.
    The master glass-blower
    Here stands the master glass-blower of Murano, in the Venetian lagoon. He stands grandly assured beside his furnace, watched by a wondering tour group, with a couple of respectful apprentices to hand him his implements, and his long pipe in his