After forty minutes, we flew over a town, a hillside collation of tile roofs near a white river, then continued on for a few minutes before we dropped lower, skimmed the tops of some trees (Mrs Goodheart moaned and squeezed her eyes shut), and then set down smooth as cream on a wide, long, tarmac runway, taxiing along it to a wide shed, in front of which waited two motorcars and several men. The landing strip even had lights marking its sides, I noticed. Near the hangar at the southern end were tied down a small fleet of aeroplanes, six in all, ranging from a battered RAF fighter plane to an enormous three-engined thing with wings that must have stretched nearly a hundred feet. It looked as if it had just come from the factory, and was still sheathed in gleaming metal, not yet having received the red-and-white paint that covered the others. Its sides, I saw as we flashed past it on the landing strip, were corrugated like the one we were in, the same distinctive duralumin siding of the Junkers corporation. The bigger version probably had a flight range of seven or eight hundred miles; a person would be well inside Russia before having to refuel.

We slowed and made our turn, little more than halfway up the long macadam strip. The northern end of the runway rotated slowly past my window, affording me clear view of the five substantial warehouses or godowns facing one another across the tarmac.

For a maharaja’s plaything, the air strip was a serious affair.

For someone storing goods best kept out of the British eye, those godowns were ideally placed. I itched to see inside at least one of them, but all five doors were shut tight, and appeared locked. I craned my head against the window-glass until they had disappeared behind us, then subsided into my seat like a good guest, waiting to disembark at the formal southern end of the field.

The engine died and the propeller kicked to a halt, leaving our ears ringing furiously in the silence. “Welcome to Khanpur,” our pilot announced, and opened the door with a flourish.

Mrs Goodheart needed assistance across the wing and down the folding steps. On the ground, she gulped wordlessly at the cold air and allowed her son to settle her into the seat of the waiting sedan car, grateful beyond words to enter a vehicle that was not about to leave the earth behind. Sunny, when she reached the ground, turned a circle, hands clapped together, oohing at the setting. Goodheart, filled with cool insouciance, gave a glance to the high circle of white mountains before turning his attention to our host.