Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

And in Moskova or Stadholmen they pay for those spices, weight for weight, in silver or amber.

For what – the tenth time in my life? I thought my fortune was made. However, I did not have the wherewithal to buy horses in any great numbers and had to borrow heavily from the Yemeni Jews in Aden. Nevertheless I got together a string of eighteen horses including six brood mares in foal and, heedless of the warnings of diose who know best, put them on a ship for Mangalore. Even the ship's captain, who was also in debt and in a hurry to make money, told me to wait a few weeks, but I would have none of it. We were duly caught in the north-east monsoon and shipwrecked on one of the Laccadive coral islands where we remained for five weeks, eating horseflesh, before we were picked up by pearl fishers and taken on to Mangalore.

I was now penniless and return to the Yemen was not an option – the Jews there would have had me impaled as a warning to reneging borrowers and indeed it seemed the only asset I had left was the black packet my Brother of the Free Spirit had given me two years earlier and a handful of gold coin I had managed to keep about my person. I called at the godown of the agent of a Cairo-based trailer I had done business with in the past, though not in Mangalore. However, his chief clerk here had heard of me and was able to advise me that Prince Harihara Raya Kurteishi was part of the Emperor's household with a senior position in the military establishment and, of course, resided in the City of Victory itself. In the course of the next few days a large caravan was due to leave Mangalore, headed by the governor, or ttayak, and I should be able to buy myself a place in it.

A day or so later I joined the caravan, which was indeed substantial, and set off for the hinterland beyond the Ghats. At the front went priests and monks, some wearing jewelled vestments, others in simpler robes the colour of burnt earth, blowing their gilded trumpets, striking their gongs and chiming their finger cymbals, scenting the air around them with frankincense, and bearing on a shoulder-high litter a bronze but gilded and polychrome statue of the dancing, tour-armed Shiva, ringed as usual with fire, draped with silk and decorated with jewels and garlands. Behind him came the governor, who was returning to the City of Victory for the great festival of Mahanavami, which marks the end of the monsoon season, the same monsoon that had shipwrecked me and my horses.

He rode on the first of six elephants, caparisoned in velvet with gold bullion tassels and edgings. Next came a score of mounted soldiers carrying burnished spears and shields inlaid with gold, silver, copper and mother-of-pearl, all of which flashed sunlight back through the moist haze. They were there for show – war-parties from the sultanates do not come so far south and none of the civil population has any cause to threaten the lives of their rulers. In this happy land even mountain brigandage is unheard of.

Behind this ceremonial bodyguard came twenty or so donkeys on one of the first of which I rode, the rest being used to carry the impedimenta we might require on the way. Westerners despise people who ride donkeys, reserving the animal for purposes of draught, even though their principal goddess rode one on her way from Palestine to Egypt and later her son, the Prophet Jesus, also used one to enter Jerusalem in triumph. I had no such reservations, especially as by then I had reached an age where riding was always preferable to walking. Behind the donkeys came mules and a camel train carrying goods from all over the known world which, once the monsoon was over, had begun again to arrive in Mangalore.

Forgive me for dwelling a little on this journey. I have been constrained at times to make a mendicant's living out of telling tales of travel on street corners or in places where men eat and take their leisure, and old habits die hard.

First, once we had left the bustle and mess of Mangalore (ports, even in the best arranged of places, are always messy, are they not?) there was a narrow plain some thirty or so miles wide, of wetlands, of lagoons filled with wading birds and fishing boats, rafts and floating villages with, where the land rose a few feet, plantations of coconut palms and plantains. The road, a causeway, threaded its way often across a carpet of lotus whose flowers the women and girls of the villages, Tamils, wove into garlands, which they either wore or offered in homage to the god who went before us. Often they sang and danced, and the twanging of their stringed instruments and the wailing of their flutes signalled our arrival or faded into the mists behind us.

As we left the lagoons we crossed land that was still wet but drained, where water levels could be controlled, and here were the paddy-fields of rice, a bluish green at that time of year and like a haze of fur across the greenish blue of the water. The earth beneath the hoofs and feet of our animals became firmer, so they clipped and clopped instead of squelching, and lifted us above the palms, watery lotus plains and rice paddies. We camped for the first night on the outskirts of a village set in fields of coriander, which almost overcame us with the sweet, fruity, spicy fragrance of its flowers and seeds and the more acrid odour of leaves crushed by the passing feet of peasants.

More pungent yet and pepper)' were the plantations of cardamom trees on the higher slopes above the village, which we passed through on the following morning, leaving the coastal plain behind us under a nacreous blanket of mist. It came to my mind that somewhere nearby was the tiny plantation of k'hSwah bushes I had caused to be planted, but I was given no opportunity to leave the caravan and seek out the plot I had leased.

As well as cardamoms there were groves of cinnamon and hedges of peppercorn vines and, near the copious streams that tumbled out of the Ghats, reed-beds of ginger whose bulbous rhizomes were hung along the cane walls of the dwelling-places to dry. Amongst these spice plantations there were also groves of citrus trees, whose fruits hung amongst their star-like flowers, golden lamps in a green night, including the sweeter varieties recently imported from China.

We camped that second night in the foothills of the Ghats and near the entrance to a soaring but narrow gorge through which tumbled one of the many rivers that fed the lagoons we had passed through and would continue to do so, months even after the monsoons had passed. Already the air was cooler, partly on account of the height we had climbed but also because of the continuous and conflicting breezes that funnelled through the gorge or eddied over the rounded foothills. Much of the area remained virgin forest stalked by jaguars, hunted over by eagles and forming not only wonderful groves filled with flowers and honey but shelter, too, for many animals, tiny deer, pigs and even wild elephant.

But I suspect you would prefer me not to describe every stage of that journey. Suffice it to say the next day the climb through the winding gorge became more and more terrifying, the track narrower, the precipitous drops from it to the cataracts below steeper and deeper until we reached a point when looking down we could see the backs of soaring eagles and vultures. Then, at last, the sky opened out again and we found ourselves not at the top of a pass with a descent equally horrendous in front of us, but rather in an upland of broken countryside, riven with valleys that opened out into undulating plains albeit crags still soared above them. This vast and varied landscape now tilted towards the east, for the large rivers of the area ran in that direction towards the Eastern Ghats, through which they tumble along the Coromandel coast.

This broken plain, scarred and scored by rivers, was by tar the most fertile land I have ever seen, for the areas the rivers could not reach were served by a network of artificial canals and waterways, carved from the virgin rock or built of cunningly interlocked blocks of stone. Every crop flourished in that rich soil, that warm atmosphere, and so plenteous was the supply of food that the lords of that land were able to maintain tracts of untouched forest as hunting reserves without diminishing the welfare of the ordinary people.