"Does that mean your king's zenana women all ride in these strange coaches, instead of on elephants?"
"In the first place, King James has no zenana. I don't think he'd know what to do with that many women. And there are absolutely no elephants in England. Not even one."
"Can you possibly understand how hard it is for me to imagine a place without elephants and zenanas?" She looked at him and smiled. "And no camels either?"
"No camels. But we have lots of stories about camels too. Tell me, is it true that if you're poisoned, you can be put inside a newly slain camel and it will draw out the poison?"
Shirin laughed again and looked up the hill toward the stables, where pack camels were being fed and massaged with sesame oil. The bells on their chest ropes sounded lightly as their keepers began harnessing them, in strings of five. Hawksworth turned to watch as the men began fitting two of the camels to carry a mihaffa, a wooden turret suspended between them by heavy wooden poles. All the camels were groaning pitifully and biting at their keepers, their customary response to the prospect of work.
"That sounds like some tale you'd hear in the bazaar. Why should a dead camel draw out poison?" She turned back to Hawksworth. "Sometimes you make the English sound awfully naive. Tell me what it's really like there."
"It is truly beautiful. The fairest land there is, especially in the late spring and early summer, when it's green and cool." Hawksworth watched the sun emerge from behind a distant hill, beginning to blaze savagely against the parched winter landscape almost the moment it appeared. Thoughts of England suddenly made him long for shade, and he took Shirin's arm, leading her around the side of their rise and back into the morning cool. Ahead of them lay yet another bleak valley, rocky and sere. "I sometimes wonder how you can survive here in summer. It was already autumn when I made landfall and the heat was still unbearable."
"Late spring is even worse than summer. At least in summer there's rain. But we're accustomed to the heat. We say no feringhi ever gets used to it. I don't think anyone from your England could ever really love or understand India."
"Don't give up hope yet. I'm starting to like it." He took her chin in his hand and carefully studied her face with a scrutinizing frown, his eyes playing critically from her eyes to her mouth to her vaguely aquiline Persian nose. "What part do I like best?" He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. "I think it's the diamond you wear in your left nostril."
"All women wear those!" She bit at him. "So I have to also. But I've never liked it. You'd better think of something else."