Now follows the strangest story of 2003. It concerns Gavin Sexton, a fireman at Redbridge, near the port of Southampton in England. A fine, handsome man with classically English symmetrical features, high cheekbones, a strong but proportionate nose and a banquet of fine teeth.
He loved living dangerously: he was an expert in martial arts, a triathlete and a motorbike fanatic - and, of course, his 12 years' work as a fireman regularly brought him close to the jaws of death. But h had reached that point in life - his mid-thirties - when he felt that unless he soon saw something of the world, he never would. So just over a year ago, he bade farewell to his fellow firemen in Redbridge, Hampshire, and headed east, for India, on an Enfield motorbike.
The story becomes a little vague here, because he was travelling solo, and he can no longer tell us what befell him. He travelled on the Old Silk Road to Samarkand, in the Zarafshan valley in Uzbekistan. This is a place which for a score of centuries has made Western man and Easterner alike dizzy with its vapours, spices, gold, copperware, its mysteries, its steaming caravans of pouting, swaying camels. This was where Timur - Tamburlaine - laid the foundations for one of the most tolerant civilisations of the ancient world, one which lasts to this day.
Then he cycled on to Nepal, where the Himalayas mark one of the great continental collisions, as a freebooting Indian subcontinent wandered around the oceans, charging into and linking with the great land-mass of Eurasia. Maybe he had put the bike under too much stress in the vast mountain ranges there; or maybe that happened later, as he turned west, and homeward for Hampshire.
Just before Christmas, Gavin arrived in the Akhbar Guesthouse in Bam, Iran, a favourite in The Lonely Planet guide to improbable places. He took his poor, mauled bike to a bike-shop and then sauntered back to the guesthouse to join its owner, Akbhar Panjalizhadeh, in the gardens which had so often beguiled Westerners. They sat beneath the date palms, surrounded by warm stone. It was so very pleasant that Gavin decided to stay another night.
This was the decision that ended his life. On December 26th, in the dead of early morning, one of the most violent earthquakes in living memory sent tectonic shock waves into the heart of Bam. Thousands of buildings folded within seconds, trapping scores of thousands of people. It was a calamity on an unutterable scale, not just in those few evil seconds when the living were turned into dead with no intermediary phase, but in the terrible hours which followed. The screams of terror and the agonised shrieks of 10,000 trapped people caused rescuers a hundred moral dilemmas a minute. Should we search through this impossible rubble, wherein a baby cries unbearably? Or here, underneath this heap of impenetrable concrete, where a whimpering woman shouts as she bleeds to death?
What of those rescuers in the years to come, as they recall the people they abandoned to the suffocation of rubble, while they went instead to another, more plaintive voice, only to find that its owner was dead by time they reached him? Yet now from that other rubble, silence also, while from other mounds, hundreds and hundreds of them, the ululating din of dying despair. The world has not heard such noises on such a scale since Nagasaki.
But silent under his own funeral mound was Gavin Sexton. He who had lived to rescue, and must in his time have rescued many, had been killed as he slept in his bed. It was, in a way, an end to be envied: a good man dying instantly, untroubled by fear or panic - the kind of death the gods reserve for those whom they cherish most. No such luck befell Akhbar's son, trapped in the ruins of the hostel. Akhbar heard him moaning from within the stones, where no human hand could reach, until at last he breathed no more.
All they could do with Gavin's body was to bury it in a mass grave, along with hundreds of others, and then await whatever formal identification might be possible from the documents which had with him. Within hours, the first of many rescue services from around the world were arriving in Bam to rescue those few for whom rescue was possible, and to dispose of the thousands of corpses of those for whom it was not.
One of those teams was a party of firemen from England, who were told, almost the moment they arrived, that there was an Englishman among the dead. His body had been discovered - with so many dead, it had been disposed of - but perhaps the English would care to view his documents? Perhaps even make arrangements to contact the unfortunate man's family, Allah be good to them?
The firemen agreed; and so the very first spot they went to, among the thousands that they could have done, was the ruin of the guesthouse where the conscientious Akhbar Panjalizhadeh had kept the documents of his dead visitor. And possibly you can imagine the astonishment of these exhausted firemen from England as they opened the papers which revealed the identity of the mystery Englishman. They were Hampshire men, you see, and from Redbridge Fire Station, no less. And just over a year ago, 3,000 miles away, they had all bade a fond farewell to their colleague Gavin Sexton, as set off on his world tour.