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I asked him what breed the dog was and he said it was a Saluki. They were Arabian hunting dogs, he added, greatly prized and honoured in Arab culture, to the extent that traditionally they weren’t regarded as animals at all but as something midway between the animal and the human. They were the only non-human creatures, for example, that were permitted to enter an Arab tent. A special hole would be dug for them inside, in the sand, to lie in as a bed. They were beautiful things, he repeated.

I asked him where he had got this dog and he said that he had bought it from a German woman in the south of France. She lived in a house in the mountains behind Nice, where she bred only Saluki puppies. He had driven down there overnight, all the way from his house in Kent. When he arrived, stiff and exhausted from the journey, she had opened the door and a shoal of Salukis had run down the hall in her wake. They were big dogs already, even at only a few weeks old, but they were fleet and light and pale as phantoms. They had engulfed him, there on the doorstep, pressing their narrow faces against him and feeling him with their paws – he had expected to be knocked over but instead it had felt as though he was being stroked by feathers. She had trained them – there were nine – with an extraordinary scrupulousness: in the sitting room various snacks had been laid out for him on a low table and the nine beasts – unlike any other dog he had encountered – arranged themselves dignifiedly around it, making no attempt to snatch the food; at feeding time their nine bowls were placed in a row and filled, and they would wait for the signal to eat before beginning. Whenever their trainer passed, the nine long, elegant noses would lift in perfect synchronicity and follow her movements like nine compasses.

She had told him, over the course of his visit, the story of how she had learned to breed these extraordinary animals. She was married to a businessman, a German whose work often took him to the Middle East. At a certain point they had moved there on a permanent basis: they lived in Oman, where he pursued his career and where she, having no children and not being permitted to work, had nothing particularly to do. She was not, it seemed, interested in pursuing the activities of an expatriate wife: instead she spent her time lying on the beach and reading novels. The aimlessness of this existence, and yet its inferences of freedom and pleasure, was something she had not consciously troubled herself to analyse; but lying there one day reading, a series of strange shadows, almost like the shadows of birds, had flown before her eyes across the page and she had been compelled to look up. There, running along the sand beside the frill of surf, was a pack of dogs. Their silence and lightness and speed was such that they appeared almost to be some kind of hallucination; but then she saw, walking slowly in the distance behind them, a man, an Arab in traditional dress. While she watched, he made some barely audible sound and the pack of dogs instantly looped back in a graceful curve and returned. They sat at his feet on their haunches, their heads lifted, listening while he spoke to them. That vision, of a near-silent feat of control, and of an almost mystical empathy that nevertheless had its basis in absolute discipline, had struck her at her core: she had gone to talk to the Arab, there in the heat and glare of the beach, and had begun to learn the science of the Saluki.

They were hunting dogs, the student continued, who ran in packs behind a falcon or hawk, the bird guiding them towards their prey. In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch the hawk as they ran. The complexity and speed of this process, he said, could not be overestimated: the pack flowed silently over the landscape, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on its target. To follow the subtlety of the hawk’s signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. This idea, of the two dogs sharing the work of reading the hawk, was one he found very appealing. It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, of consciousness not as an imprisonment in one’s own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level – well, like the German trainer before him, he was both seduced by the idea and willing to do the hard work involved in executing it.

I asked whether he had succeeded in sustaining that vision with his own dog and he was silent for a while, the furrows on his prominent brow deepening. He had returned, he said, to Kent with the dog he had chosen, which he and his wife had named Sheba. The German woman had trained Sheba impeccably – she never gave them any trouble at all – and they stuck rigorously to the two hours of walking they had been instructed to give her each day. On these walks, Sheba could be let off her leash: she came when you called her and never – or not often, in any case – lost her head in pursuit of the rabbits and squirrels that populated the local landscape. She was the object of much notice and attention when they took her out, but at home she was languid almost to the point of stupefaction; she was forever lying on their laps or across their bed, draping her large, silky body over them and resting her narrow face against theirs with what was either neediness or sheer ennui – she was, as he had said, almost human. To be perfectly honest, he knew that Sheba’s potential, her magnificence as a creature, could never be realised in suburban Sevenoaks, where they lived. It was almost as if they had captured her, this rare and exotic item, captured her not entirely through their own efforts but through the long story of possession that was her destiny and that had taken her in successive steps away from who she really was. The German woman, he went on, had described to him the sight of two Salukis bringing down a gazelle between them, with such stealth and harmony it was like music made visible. There weren’t any gazelles in Sevenoaks, obviously; but he and his wife loved Sheba, and would care for her to the best of their abilities.