were shadowing him. He judged it an "enchanted city", with buildings that rivalled "the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance". Aware of his limited time, he cut short his wanderings and took the train towards Stalinabad (Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan), disembarking at Termez. This town sits on the Amu Darya (the Oxus), and the other side of the river lies in Afghanistan. Maclean claimed that "very few Europeans except Soviet frontier guards have ever seen it at this or any other point of its course". After more negotiations, he managed to cross the river and thus leave the USSR, and from that point his only guide seems to have been the narrative of "the Russian Burnaby", a colonel Nikolai Ivanovich Grodekov, who rode from Samarkand to Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat in 1878. The following day he and a guide set out on horseback, riding through jungle and desert, and detained on the way by dubious characters who may or may not have been brigands. (Maclean, a proficient linguist, was hamstrung on entering Afghanistan by the lack of any lingua franca.) They rode past the ruins of Balkh, a civilization founded by Alexander the Great and destroyed by Genghis Khan. After a night in Mazar, Maclean managed to get a car and driver, and progressed as rapidly as he could to Doaba, a village half-way to Kabul, where he had arranged to meet the British minister (i.e., ambassador), Colonel Frazer-Tytler. Together, they returned to the capital via Bamyan and its famous statues. Maclean circled back to Moscow via Peshawar, Delhi, Baghdad, Persia, and Armenia. Orient Sand: the Western Desert Campaign The middle section of the book details Maclean's first set of experiences in World War II. He was invited to join the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS), where, as part of the Western Desert Campaign, he planned and executed raids on Axis-held Benghazi, on the coast of Libya (Operation Bigamy). When it became clear that the North African Campaign was drawing to a close towards the end of 1942 and it became too quiet for his taste, he travelled east to arrest General Fazlollah Zahedi, at the time the head of the Persian armed forces in the south. Joining up The first challenge Maclean faced was getting into military service at all. His Foreign Office job was a reserved occupation, so he was not allowed to enlist. The only way