After Port Said, the Suez Canal sucked us in. As the shadows grew long we drifted down its narrow length, exchanging impassive gazes with the goats, camels, and robed humans that inhabited its sandy banks. I sat on the upper deck with a couple of the oranges we had picked up in Port Said, reading the tattered copy of Kim I had discovered in the ship’s library, rediscovering the pleasures of a classic tale with unexpected depths. The story sparkled as I remembered it, the orphan boy free to attach himself to Afghan horse-trader and wandering holy man alike, learning the Jewel Game from the enigmatic Lurgan Sahib, meeting the Babu with his clumsy surface concealing his deep committed competence. I sighed when I finished it, and dutifully returned it to the shelves between Chesterton and Wodehouse. I perused the library’s other offerings, but its contents proved considerably less informative than the armload of books I had raided from Holmes’ shelves, and I went back to them.

I was slowly putting together a picture of India in my mind, the size and immense variety in land and people, its hugely complicated caste system, based originally on the distinction between Brahmin/priest, Kshatriya/warrior, Vaisya/artisan, and Sudra/menial. The lowest of these was called “Untouchable,” but in truth, it sounded as if no one was allowed to touch anyone else, for fear the other might be of a lower caste and hence ritually unclean. And since the original four castes had splintered into thousands—as well as having Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Christians, and a hundred others thrown into the mix—I thought the population must spend most of its energy sorting out where it stood on the ladder.

I read for hours, absorbing India’s long history of conquest and re-conquest, from Alexander to Victoria; the Moghul influence on the country, long and ongoing; the East India Company’s rule so violently cut short by the 1857 Mutiny; the subsequent authority of the British government, ruling directly those portions of the country not under the command of their native rulers. The Empire in 1924: a bit worn around the edges, perhaps, but still strong.

The night was desert-cool and brilliant, and Holmes and I settled beneath the crisp crescent of moon and sat until long after midnight, wrapped in our thoughts and memories. The next day the canal spat us out into the Red Sea, and the younger Goodhearts rejoined us, transformed into old Egypt hands by nineteen hours inland, clothed in a variety of peculiar garments including topees (they no longer used the outsider’s term “pith helmet”) of a shape unknown outside the souks of Cairo, constructed of some vegetable matter (pith, one presumes) that sagged as the weather warmed.