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‘Clematis,’ Alexandros said. ‘There used to be clematis on this wall.’ He poked his hand into a hole between the old bricks. ‘I hid marbles here.’ But he brought out only a handful of dust.

Our Lady of the Mongols stood in the next street behind high red walls. The round drum of the dome presided over a courtyard of sun and old roses where a caretaker was sweeping leaves. Alexandros opened the tall west doors and the ancient ecclesiastical odours of incense and candle wax and polished wood came out to envelop us. In the narthex the glass of the framed icon of the Virgin was covered with lipstick kisses.

The church has lost various of its parts over the centuries, and what remains makes for a rather charming confusion of arches and vaults meeting at odd angles. Dusty chandeliers were suspended on long chains from the high ceilings like cast-offs from a medieval banqueting hall. Byzantine icons were deployed about the walls, the faces of saints and prophets peering out from the antique gloom of the paintings. By the icon of St Barbara was a metal crutch, left behind by a lame man who had been miraculously cured. Elsewhere votive miniatures were suspended from threads in front of the more powerful icons, in the hope of a similar miracle. Legs were popular, as were ears and feet. But the faithful did not restrict themselves to requests for new body parts: Toy cars, models of new houses, and little aeroplanes represented prayers for material success and foreign holidays. One hopeful and rather brazen petitioner had hung a photograph, clipped from a glossy magazine, in front of an icon of St George. The photograph showed a shapely young woman in a bikini. I wasn’t sure if this represented the aspirations of a man seeking help with his love life or of a woman on a diet.

The church was founded by Princess Maria, an illegitimate daughter of Michael VIII, a Byzantine emperor who tended to dole out daughters to potential allies like subsidies. It was the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Mongols were pressing on his borders. He had already dispatched one daughter to the Mongol khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of the districts to the north of the Black Sea. Maria had been engaged at a tender age to Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan and the governor of another of the four provinces of the Mongol Empire, the Il-Khanate of Persia.

The engagement was a long one and by the time Maria turned up for her wedding in Tabriz, the groom was dead. But Hulegu had graciously left his fiancée in his will to his son, Abaqa, and Maria was duly married to the man she expected to be her stepson. She spent fifteen years as Queen of the Mongols until, in 1281, Abaqa was assassinated by one of his brothers. Carefully sidestepping the advances of the assassin, who saw her as a part of his inheritance, she returned to Constantinople where her father, by now running out of daughters, promptly tried to marry her off again to yet another Mongol khan. For Maria this was one husband too many. Mongol romance had persuaded her of the merits of chastity. She became a nun and founded, or possibly rebuilt, this church sometime in the 1280s.

At the time of the Turkish conquest, some two centuries later, when icons of the Virgin all over the city were said to weep tears, Constantinople’s churches were converted to mosques. Even Haghia Sophia, for nine centuries the fairest church in Christendom, had minarets erected round the ancient dome like minders. Only Our Lady of the Mongols escaped this wholesale conversion. No one is quite sure why. It may have been that the parishioners were able to argue that a church built by the wife of a Mongol prince, inspirational figures to their distant cousins the Ottoman Turks, should be left in peace. Whatever the reason the firman or decree of Fatih, the Turkish conqueror, granting it unique leave to continue as a church, still hangs inside the west door. Our Lady of the Mongols is the only Byzantine church in the city that has continued its Christian career undisturbed.

While I browsed among the icons, Father Alexandros fussed about the old church like a conscientious housekeeper, straightening candlesticks, emptying the collection boxes, dusting the ledges of the iconostasis. He was very proud of his old church, and delighted that a foreigner was taking an interest in it. He kept breaking off from his chores to show me some detail of the place he was anxious I should not miss. He took my arm and led me across to the beautiful eleventh-century mosaic of the Virgin. ‘Theotokos Pammakaristos,’ he said, inclining his head as if he was introducing us. Through the grime of centuries the eyes of ‘The All-Joyous Mother of God’ were sad pools of light. He showed me Fatih’s firman written in loping Arabic script. Later he led me down a short flight of stairs into the crypt to sprinkle me with holy water from the well. On the fresco on the end wall the Madonna and Child hovered, as faint as ghosts. The church’s connection to the Mongols meant nothing to him; the point of Mouchliotissa for the Greek community was its connection to Byzantium.

The Syrian caretaker brought us tea in the courtyard where we sat in a long slab of sun on a ledge along the southern wall. I asked Father Alexandros about the future of the Greek community in Istanbul. ‘There is no future,’ he said blankly. ‘Greeks have been here for almost three millennia but in my lifetime I am seeing the end of it. Most of my friends have emigrated. My children will emigrate, to Athens, possibly to America.’ He was stroking the stone of the ledge as he spoke. The ancient mortar crumbled beneath his fingers. ‘This city is my home, home to our people, but it has abandoned us. Unless you are a Turk, it is impossible here. Greeks have no future in Constantinople.’

When the first tempest of Mongol conquest appeared to have abated in the middle of the thirteenth century, the princes of Christendom longed to know more about these Eastern apparitions who had come so close to overrunning Europe. A series of missions was dispatched, most led by Franciscan friars, to report on the Mongols and to enquire about the possibility of their conversion to Christianity. From the Pope down, European leaders nurtured the rather bizarre hope that the Mongol horsemen could be harnessed as allies to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land.

Two of these friars wrote accounts of their journeys, John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. The latter produced the more interesting book, full of wry and colourful observations about the Mongol hersdmen who had so suddenly found themselves ruling most of the known world. His mission predates Marco Polo’s more famous journey to Cathay by almost twenty years; even Polo’s great English commentator, Sir Henry Yule, was obliged to admit that Friar William had written ‘a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo’s chapters’. But William suffered the fate of many worthy authors: a bad publisher. His book never achieved the circulation of Polo’s accounts.

We tend to think of Friar William now as an early explorer, and like the best explorers he had no idea where he was going, how he was going to get there, or what he should do once he arrived. When William left from Istanbul in the spring of 1253, he was setting off, like Jason and the Argonauts, into barbarian darkness. His journey took him from Istanbul across southern Russia and what is now Kazakhstan to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum. It was the route I wanted to follow and I saw him, across seven centuries, as a travelling companion.

William set sail from Istanbul on one of the trading vessels that carried cotton, silk and spices from Constantinople to the ports on the north shore of the Black Sea. In Karaköy, round a watery corner from the Golden Horn, I found the modern equivalents of William’s ship, the Russian and Ukrainian freighters which ply the same route. The fall of Communism has given a new impetus to Black Sea trade, and Turkey has become a conduit for Western goods, from tinned tomatoes to Johnnie Walker whisky. Russians and Ukrainians, now as free to travel as Levi’s and Coca-Cola, come to Istanbul to savour the bright lights and to buy in bulk. They travel by freighter, the only kind of vessel able to cope with their excess baggage.

My telephone enquiries had been inconclusive and I had come to the docks to see if I could rustle up a passage. In pole position was a huge cruise liner called the Marco Polo. Had William had a more aggressive publisher this floating palace might have been named after him. Beyond Marco’s luxurious namesake the shipping degenerated spectacularly. There were a few European freighters, shouldering the docks like naval toughs, then a couple of Turkish ships, painted gunmetal grey. At the far end of the dock I came to the Russian and Ukrainian freighters, the shipping equivalent of MOT failures, held together by rust stains and a grimy coating of oil.

The last ship was the Mikhail Lomonosov, an ageing rust-bucket that seemed to be kept afloat by its mooring ropes. It had a limp deflated appearance that one did not like to see in a ship, as if someone had let the air out of its tyres. It listed. It sagged. It exuded black smoke from unpromising quarters, like the portholes.

I called up to a man in a naval smock leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway. He replied that they were sailing for Sevastopol on Monday, in two days’ time. He waved me aboard and I stepped gingerly onto the gangway, unsure if the ship could take my weight.

Dimitri introduced himself as the second mate. He had one of those narrow Slavic faces, very pale and very bony, that are permanently knotted in expressions of anxiety. I asked about cabins, and he summoned the accommodation officer by barking into a pipe in the bulwark behind him. The accommodation officer took me below, showed me a cramped cabin full of sacks of onions, which he assured me would be cleared out, and then took a hundred dollars off me in exchange for a grubby receipt written on the back of a beer mat.

The speed and the casualness of the transaction startled me. Back on deck I lingered by the gangway with the second mate, hoping to learn more about this ship which now contained such a large proportion of my publisher’s advance. In spite of his dour appearance, he seemed eager to talk. He spoke the casual staccato English of ships.

‘Did you get receipt?’ he asked.

I showed him my beer mat. He nodded. Beer mats were obviously accepted currency on the Mikhail Lomonosov.

‘You can’t trust anyone on this ship,’ he said. He leaned forward to spit over the rail. ‘This is my last voyage. I can’t take it any more. Do you know how many times I make this trip? Sevastopol, Istanbul. Istanbul, Sevastopol.’

I told him I had no idea.

‘Four hundred forty-seven,’ he said. ‘It is no life. This is my last voyage. Four hundred forty-seven. It’s enough, I think. It’s making me crazy. If I don’t get off this ship, I will kill someone.’

I took what comfort I could from the fact that he had ruled out murder as a career option.

A bell rang twice from somewhere within the ship, and he turned to go. ‘We sail at six o’clock, Monday evening. Don’t be late.’

The following day, a Sunday, I went to morning mass at Our Lady of the Mongols. I felt a few prayers for the voyage wouldn’t go amiss. When I arrived the service had already begun but Father Alexandros broke off in mid-chant to usher me personally into a seat. As I looked uneasily about the church I realized why I had got the special treatment. I was the congregation. It is a measure of the decline of this ancient church here in its Patriarchal city that the only worshipper it could muster on a warm spring Sunday was a lone Irish Presbyterian.

There is not a lot to do in Presbyterian services except doze off in your pew while a flushed preacher warns of the fire and brimstone that awaits you just the other side of retirement. A couple of hymns, the collection plate, and we all went home. For Presbyterians even a common Anglican mass was a complicated affair involving a disturbing degree of participation – responses, collective prayer, not to mention the endless standing and kneeling at unpredictable moments. Now suddenly I was the crucial component of the most arcane ritual that the Christian church has to offer, here in the last remnant of Byzantium.

The only other people present were a neanderthal-looking altar boy who kept peering out at me through a door in the iconostasis as if he had never seen a congregation before and an elderly cantor, a cadaverous figure in a black robe. With a scythe and a grin the cantor could have doubled as the Grim Reaper. He stood to one side at a lectern chanting interminable passages in ancient Greek in a thin beautiful voice. In the pauses where the congregation were obviously meant to respond, he looked across at me from beneath lowered lids. I looked at the floor or examined the dome with a critical intensity. Amen was the only word I understood and whenever I heard it I joined in heartily to make up for all the important stuff I must have been leaving out. Otherwise I signalled my involvement by throwing in as many signs of the cross as I could manage – not exactly a Presbyterian thing, but I had seen people do this in films.

Later in the courtyard the Grim Reaper took his leave with a slow funereal nod while Father Alexandros and I lingered to have coffee with Nadia, the Syrian caretaker, as if it was already an established ritual between us.

I didn’t allude to the fact that there had been no congregation. It was like some dysfunction that one politely ignored. With the same courtesy Alexandros didn’t mention my own lamentable performance as an Orthodox worshipper.

‘How long will you stay in Istanbul?’ Alexandros asked.

‘I leave tomorrow.’

‘Do you fly back to London?’

‘No, I am going on to Outer Mongolia,’ I said, as if it formed part of some natural tour of the region. As I listed the stages of my route – across the Black Sea, then overland across the Crimea, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – he tried to disguise his shock behind a polite clerical façade.

He put his empty cup down on the ledge between us. ‘And what do you hope to find in Mongolia?’ he asked. Despite his best efforts, I felt a note of sarcasm had crept into his voice.

I expanded on the fascination of nomads, speaking rather too fast, overdoing the enthusiasm as I tried to convince him. I might have been speaking about the dark side of the moon. Alexandros was the epitome of the polished metropolitan figure: a Greek, a man of the city from the race that had created the city state, a man whose ancestors may have inhabited this city, one of the world’s oldest and greatest, since before the birth of Christ. He seemed to shudder involuntarily at the notion of nomads, people who lived in tents, people who built nothing. Confronted by his civilized sophistication, I was struggling to convince even myself that the Mongolians were not barbarians who had taken a historical wrong turn when they decided to stick to sheep rather than join the ranks of the committed settlers determined to create something that would outlast their own lifetime.

‘I have little opportunity to travel,’ he said at last.

He looked up at the old church. ‘I must look after Mouchliotissa. If we don’t keep the church alive, the Turks will take it from us. When the church disappears there will be nothing left of Constantinople, or of us.’

It was the irresistible tug of the city, the lasso of his own identity moored among these ancient stones.

When Friar William was invited to preach in Haghia Sophia on Palm Sunday of 1253, the great church was already very old. Built in the 530s by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, it belongs to the architectural tradition of the Roman basilica, and thus indirectly to the pagan world of the Greek temple.

The brilliance of Haghia Sophia is the transition from the earthbound exterior to the soaring lightness of its interior. From the outside the great church is monumental and brooding, the original form much confused with buttresses and minarets added after the Turkish conquest when it began a new career as a mosque. Inside it takes flight. It is transfiguration in architecture. You may run your hands over the massive outer walls, a millennium and a half, stained and crumbling beneath your fingers, but the ethereal magic of the nave is less palpable. The air is gold- and rust-coloured, like some exhalation of the old mosaics and the red marble. Moted columns of light fall from the high windows onto the wide expanses of the floor. The walls, the columns, the distant vaults, might have been weightless; the great dome, Procopius wrote over fourteen centuries ago, seems to be suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Robert Byron compared the old basilica to St Peter’s in Rome. Haghia Sophia is a church to God, he wrote, St Peter’s merely ‘a salon for his agents’.

It is a daunting place to begin a journey to the nomadic steppes. I spent hours in Haghia Sophia wandering the upper galleries beneath the conch vaults gazing down into the great canyon of the nave. I had come to see it as my world and I lingered here as a kind of farewell. As the slanting afternoon light crept through the galleries, amid lengthening shadows, I listened to the crescendo of the great city outside as its inhabitants began their journeys home. In the golden embrace of Haghia Sophia, I suddenly saw the journey to Mongolia as a Byzantine might have done, a journey into emptiness, into some fearful void. I understood the ambitions and the richness of cities. The desire to carve the aspirations of the human heart into some permanent form was central to my own world. In Haghia Sophia that impulse had produced sublime transcendance.

On this day at the beginning of June, on the other side of Asia, the Mongolians would be packing up and moving to summer pastures, leaving nothing to mark their passage but the shadows on the spring grass where their tents had stood.

Chapter Two THE VOYAGE OUT

At the docks my fellow passengers, a queue of burly figures beneath amorphous sacks, were making their up the gangway of the Mikhail Lomonosov like newsreel refugees.

Below in the cabin the resident onions had been cleared away leaving a faint astringent odour and a litter of red skins. The accommodation master appeared with my cabin-mate, a fifteen-year-old boy from Sevastopol. Kolya had been visiting his mother who was working in Istanbul. He was a thin boy with a mutinous complexion and an agitated manner. His gangly limbs jerked and rattled with adolescent impatience.

Kolya and I conversed in a bizarre amalgam of English, Turkish and Russian, prompted by various phrase books and a vocabulary of gestures and mime. It made for surprisingly lucid conversation. At first I tried to chat to him about kid’s stuff – his age, his school, his mother, ice-hockey – but he brushed these dull enquiries aside. He was keen to know the legal age limit for smoking and drinking in England, what kind of guns the police carried in London, and if the Queen was still in the business of beheading. His Istanbul had been somewhat different from mine. He had never heard of Haghia Sophia but he knew where to buy imitation Rolex watches and could quote the prices in three currencies. Like everyone else on this ship, he was a small trader, bringing home goods to sell in Sevastopol. He showed me his wares, – T-shirts, switchblades, pornographic magazines.

He sat on the edge of his bunk, drumming his legs in a nervous rhythm, blowing smoke rings towards the porthole. Kolya was in a hurry to grow up, to find the fast-track to the adult world of hard currency, illegal trading, and women. I was more than he could have hoped for as a cabin-mate, a representative of the glamorous and decadent West, that happy land of rap stars and Playstations. Hoping to cement our relationship, he looked for a way to make himself useful to me. I was a lone foreigner on a ship of Ukrainians and Russians, and he began to cast himself as my protector.

His mother appeared at the door of the cabin to say goodbye. A tall blonde Venus in a fur-collared coat, she was an exotic dancer making a Ukrainian fortune in one of Istanbul’s nightclubs. In the narrow passage Kolya was momentarily tearful – a boy like any other saying goodbye to his mother – but once she was gone he was quick to shake off this unwelcome vulnerability. He began to count the fistful of dollars that she had tucked into his pocket. Then he bolted out the door as if he had another ship to catch. Fifteen minutes later he was back, carrying a shopping bag from the free-port facilities on the quayside. Inside was a hard plastic case. Opening it, he lifted out an automatic pistol.

‘A hundred dollars,’ he said, breaking the seal on the box of ammunition.

‘What is it for?’ I asked, ducking as he swung the gun round the cabin.

‘Protection,’ the boy said. His eyes shone.

He had bought a shoulder-holster as well, and sought my help in buckling it round his thin shoulders. Then he slipped the gun into the new leather, and put on his jacket to hide the weapon. Smiling, the child stood before me, armed and dangerous, ready for the voyage home.

We sailed at nine. Below in the cabin, I felt a series of shudders run through the ship, and went out on deck to find us slipping away from our berth. Swinging about in the entrance to the Golden Horn, where a stream of cars was crossing the Galata Bridge, we turned up the Bosphorus away from the old city. The world’s most splendid skyline, that exquisite silhouette of minarets and domes, was darkening on a lemon-coloured sky. Haghia Sophia, round-shouldered above the trees of Gülhane, was the colour of a shell, a delicate shading of pinks and greys. Swaying in the wash of currents, ferries pushed out from the docks at Eminönü, bound for Üsküdar where the lights were coming on along the Asian shore. On the foredeck, I made my way through the cables and the piled crates to stand in the prow of the ship as we slipped northward through the heart of the city.

The austere face of the Dolmabahçe Palace, the nineteenth-century successor to the Topkapi, rose on our left. Its restrained façade belies a kitsch interior, a confection of operatic furnishings too ghastly to detail. It was here that the last Sultans watched their enfeebled empire slither to an ignominious end in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the palace was given over to the harem, whose membership seemed to grow as the number of imperial provinces declined. Sex, presumably, was some consolation for political impotency.

The Bosphorus is a pilot’s nightmare. In the twisting straits ships veer back and forth between the two continents, dodging the powerful currents and each other. We passed so close to the mosque at Ortaköy on the European side that I was able to look down through grilled windows to see a row of neatly synchronized bottoms, upturned in prayer. Half a mile on I could see what was on television in the stylish rooms of the old renovated Ottoman houses on the Asian shore. Accidents are not uncommon, and people tell amusing anecdotes about residents of the waterside villas being awoken in the middle of a foggy winter night to find a Russian freighter parked in the living room. Since the late seventies no less than twelve listed yalis or Ottoman houses have been run down by ships, invariably captained by tipsy Russians.

A spring wind had blown up, the Kozkavuran Firtinasi, the Wind of the Roasting Walnuts, which comes down to the Bosphorus from the hills of Anatolia. On the Asian shore we passed the twin-spired façade of the Ottoman cavalry school where cadets were taught some shadow of the horsemanship that had brought their ancestors from Central Asia. Beyond I could make out the ragged outline of Rumeli Hisari, its crenellated walls breasting the European hills. On the slopes below is the oldest Turkish cemetery in Istanbul. Both here and at the cemetery at Eyüp, there is a marvellous literature of death, ironic and light-hearted. I had been reading translations of them at breakfast. They are a fine lesson in how to say farewell.

‘A pity to good-hearted Ismail Efendi,’ reads one epitaph, ‘whose death caused great sadness among his friends. Having caught the illness of love at the age of seventy, he took the bit between his teeth and dashed full gallop to paradise.’ On another tombstone a relief shows three trees, an almond, a cypress, and a peach; peaches are a Turkish metaphor for a woman’s breasts. ‘I’ve planted these trees so that people may know my fate. I loved an almond-eyed, cypress-tall maiden, and bade farewell to this world without savouring her peaches.’ As we passed, the cemetery showed only as an area of darkness.

Soon the city was slipping astern. The tiered lights fell away on both shores and Europe and Asia drifted apart as the straits widened. I stood in the bow until we passed Rumeli Feneri and Anadolu Feneri, the lighthouses on the two continents flanking the northern entrance to the Bosphorus, blinking with different rhythms.

In antiquity the Black Sea was a watery frontier. When the Ionian Greeks crossed its wind-driven reaches in search of fish and wheat, they came upon a people on the far shores who might have stepped from one of their own mythologies. The Scythians were a diverse collection of nomadic tribes with a passion for gold and horses. To the Greeks they were barbarians, the repository of their anxieties and their prejudice.

Herodotus gives us a compelling account of them. His descriptions show remarkable similarities with Friar William’s account of the Mongols two thousand years later, a reminder if one was needed of the static nature of nomadic society and the pervading anxieties they aroused in settled populations. They were a people without towns or crops, Herodotus tells us, clearly unnerved. They lived on the produce of their herds of cattle and sheep and horses, migrating seasonally in search of fresh pasture. They slaughtered their sheep without spilling blood, drank fermented mare’s milk and smoked hemp which made them howl with pleasure. They were shamans who worshipped the elements and the graves of their ancestors. In battle they formed battalions of mounted archers. Their equestrian skills were unrivalled, and they sought the trophies of their enemies’ skulls for drinking-cups.

The ship lifted on the sea’s swell, its bow rising to the dark void ahead. A new wind was blowing, the Meltemi. It was a north-easterly blowing from the Pontic steppe across 500 miles of sea. In Istanbul they say the Meltemi is a cleansing wind, dispelling foul airs and bad feelings.

Historically, the people of cities have had an ambivalent response to the unsettled landscapes of the steppe which seem to harbour ideas both of Arcadia and of chaos. Settled peoples were forever torn between the notions that nomads were barbarian monsters who threatened civilized order, and intuitive innocents who retained some elemental virtue that had been lost to them. ‘Nomads are closer to the created world of God,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Arab historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, ‘and removed from the blameworthy customs that have infected the hearts of settlers.’ He believed that they alone could escape the cycles of decadence that infected all civilization. Only regular blasts of their cleansing winds allowed civilization to sustain its own virtues.

Kolya came to fetch me from my post in the ship’s bow, motioning for me to follow him as if he had something urgent to show me. Downstairs in our cabin he produced a bottle of champagne and four plastic cups. Then he disappeared and returned a moment later with two women.

Anna and Olga were the occupants of the neighbouring cabin. They were a dramatic illustration of the way that Slavic women seem unable to find any middle ground between slim grace and stout coarseness. Anna was a striking figure in tight jeans and a short sleeveless top. Olga, in cardigan and heavy shoes, wouldn’t have stood out among a party of dockers. Kolya, already a slave to female beauty, had only invited her to make up the numbers.

He was an energetic host, a fifteen-year-old playing at cocktail party. He poured the champagne, produced packets of American cigarettes and a bag of pistachio nuts, and chatted to everyone, the life of the party. I felt like a debutante being launched into the ship’s society. When the women asked about me Kolya explained I was going to visit the Tartars, and that I was a good friend of a priest called William who had been to visit them already.

Olga was silent and morose while Anna did all the talking. She had spent three weeks in Istanbul and was now travelling home to Sevastopol. The purpose of her visit was unclear. She tried to make it sound like a holiday but her cabin, like all the cabins on this boat, was so crowded with canvas sacks and cardboard boxes tied with string she could barely get the door open. The collapse of Communism had made everyone a salesman. But Anna, I suspected, had been trading more than tinned sardines. The Black Sea routes carried a heavy traffic of young women bound for the red-light districts of Istanbul. Many were part-timers making three or four trips a year to boost the family income.

We drank the champagne and when it was finished Kolya fetched another bottle, which I tried in vain to pay for. The boy was our host, magnanimous and expansive. He made toasts, he told dirty jokes that made the girls laugh, he kept his jacket on, buttoned up to conceal the gun. Olga soon drifted away to shift some crates and Anna now basked alone in our attention. She had become flirtatious. With the boy she already enjoyed a maternal familiarity, alternately hugging him and slapping him in mock remonstration, and now she extended the same attentions to me, pinching my shoulder and propping her elbows on my knees.