Orient Express (12 page)

Meanwhile the Ford was bowling along. We passed all the pilgrims who had spent the night in the caravanserai. The dry rolling plain was getting uneasy, breaking into gulches. Suddenly the plain began to flow through a gap in the hills. The road was drawn with it and we were going down a broadening, steepening valley. The valley narrowed to a gorge and we were zigzagging down the huge face of a mountain. Below us the hills dropped away in folds like enormous steps into a series of blue streaked horizontals. The Sea?—The Messpot, said the Armenian—Over there, Baghdad.

At Kasr Shirin everybody seemed to think I was in a great hurry. It was a pleasant pink and white town with porches held up on thin white-daubed columns. I wanted to wait and eat something, to sit around and see the town, but everyone seemed to think I would miss the train if I waited a second, so before I could help myself I was put in a vehicle with three gendarmes with rifles and packed off, as I thought towards Khanikin.

This vehicle was drawn by two mules and looked a little like the pictures of the ox-drawn beds of the Merovingian kings you used to get on little
bon point
cards they gave you when you knew your French lesson. It was the shape of a spring wagon—it had no springs—with a top and delicately looped side curtains. The woodwork was painted with pink and blue and purple flowers. In it the officer of gendarmerie and I lay at full length back to back, our heads elegantly resting in the palms of our hands, while the two men at arms squatted at our feet. The driver walked alongside and cursed at the mules.

So in reluctant and Shebalike splendor I was conveyed out of Kasr Shirin and out of Persia.

Across a crazy tumbled region of pink and violet and eroded orange hillocks, vermilion badlands, and the great pebbly bed of a river. Not a spear of green anywhere, nothing but this confusion of crumbling mineral color in the clangor of the afternoon sun. The vehicle plunged and lurched in the ruts of the fissured track; pink dust hung about us, and at last, shaken and thirsty and hungry and buffeted, we arrived at the railhead, a jumping-off place of jumping-off places. Yellow barrack sheds surrounded a patch of wheel-tracked dust where a few old men sat selling watermelons; beyond were some more sheds beside a track where stood three uncoupled freight cars. All this was penned off by fence after fence of barbed wire. This was the station and quarantine of the Iraq border.

The Persian gendarmes carried the hippo and escorted me gravely into the station building and then left me; the vehicle drove off and I was alone with the flies. After hours I found the babu stationmaster. He was pompous and severe. The time was different from Persia, the money was different; this wasn't Khanikin; there was nowhere to get anything to eat. So I sat on the hippo in the shade outside the station door, trying to eat my watermelon before the flies did, getting stickier and stickier and dustier and dustier, and lonelier and lonelier. Down the track a vague squatting of “natives,” characterless natives out of Kipling.

At last a wheezy black locomotive arrived, towing three grey cars with sunshutters, giving out from every crack the smell of steam and machine oil that brought all terminals back to my mind, the old Seventh Street Depot in Washington and the Grand Central and the South Station and the Gare St. Lazare and the Gare d'Orléans and the Gare de Lyon and the Estacion del Mediodia and the Bahnhof in Strasbourg. Oh, the meals eaten in station restaurants and the coffee and drinks at midnight in the little bars across the street! The oyster stew at the Grand Central and langoustes opposite the Gare St. Lazare, the bolted meals at Bobadilla and the chestnuts and churros at the end of the Calle Atocha, the pickled partridges and the snails washed down with manzanilla, all the last meals in all the terminal cities, meals mixed with the smell of steam and the thump hiss, thump-hiss, thumphiss of engines. Candy cigars cigarettes.… Have a nice chicken sandwich, individual brick of pure homemade Horton's icecream.… Nothing sold after the train leaves.… Oh, even the paper sandwiches and the smell of diapers on the New York, New Haven, & Hartford.

And all I could do was sit there in the dark amid screaming memories and stuff myself with watermelon, and watch, in the dim light of the single lamp on the station, the pilgrims from Persia who had lost, in crossing the magic line of British dominion, their merriment, their dignity of feature and gesture, the elegance of their rags and their tall felt hats, and had become as they crowded into the sweaty train mere featureless natives out of Kipling.

At last in great distress in the midriff from overmuch watermelon and alarmed by what a French doctor had told me, Monsieur en Iraq il ne faut pas abuser des pastèques, I curled up in the striped Tabriz blanket and went to sleep.

I woke up to find an Englishman offering a drink; the train was in Khanikin; he had ridden down from some oil borings somewhere to the north. We sat up drinking in the dim light of the sleeping compartment talking about the Yezedis. All his workmen were Yezedis, devil-worshippers. He was trying to collect data about them, though it was very hard to find out anything very definite about them. The cult centered about a town or a tomb near Mosul, named Sheikh Aadi. They were supposed to be the last fragments of some Manichæan sect. They had a sacred book, but writing and reading were forbidden them. The name of Sheitan was holy and all the s and sh sounds were cut out of their language. They were supposed to have promiscuous love feasts on certain nights like those the Romans liked to ascribe to the early Christians. They always did the lowest possible kind of work, they were roadmenders and scavengers, and, a few of the richest of them, truck-gardeners. They were supposed to believe in the gnostic sevenfold emanation of God, but Sheitan they worshipped as lord of this world in the form of a golden peacock.

Eventually there was no more whisky and no more watermelon and no more about the Yezedis, and we went to sleep. When I woke up the Englishman had gone. The sun was rising over a vast plain dusty and treeless as a New York backyard that stretched an even battleship grey in every direction, without hills or houses or faintest hope of breakfast.

IX. BAGHDAD BAHNHOF

1.
Angels on Wheels

You sit in a garden outside of the American Bar on Tigris bank under some scrawny palms. At the foot of the grey mud bank the Tigris runs almost the color of orangepeel in the evening light. At a fire of palmstalks an Arab with his skirts girded up is frying Saratoga potatoes in a huge pan of boiling grease. As fast as he fries them he hands them out on plates to vague khakied Anglo-Saxons who sit limply drinking Japanese beer and talking about malaria, sandfly fever and dysentery. Round boats of wickerwork and skins (see Xenophon) navigate the swift river, spinning as they go. An occasional long wherry with a lantern in the bow shoots out from under the bridge of boats modelled on the one with which Cæsar crossed the Rhine. In the drinking of a glass of Japanese beer the day flares up yellow like a guttering lamp and goes out, leaving night, the scudding lanterns of the wherries, the arclights on the bridge and the dense Chaldæn sky embossed with stars.

From far away across the river come the hoot of a locomotive and the banging of shunted freightcars. The Baghdad Railway. The mazout-burning locomotives hoot derisively beyond the mud horizons. Oh, never-to-be-finished Baghdad Bahn that was to have joined the Sultan Shah Mulay Wilhelm Khan Pasha to his Eastern dominions, bogey of queasy-livered colonels in the Indian service, Moloch well fattened with young men's lives, phantom on lurid wheels that ran mad expresses through the eighteen-nineties up the steep years of the new century, only to smash up once and for all in the great bloody derailment of the War. Even now the apocalyptic vision of flaming wheels linking India with Constantinople, Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Ostend, hovers over our heads like a greedy and avenging angel as we sit in the dark on Tigris bank drinking Japanese beer and eating Saratoga chips made by an Arab over a fire of palmstalks. Above our heads out of the dense sky the old gods of Chaldæa stare with set unblinking eyes at the river and the bridge of boats and the staffcars and the barracks and the littered trainyards and the fences of barbed wire and the trenches and the sodawater factories and the gutted bazaars and the moving-picture theaters and the great straggling stinking camps of refugees.

—Well, says the fat man from Illinois who is here to buy guts for the sausage factories of Chicago,—may be the Chicago of the Near East some day.… Still it'll take some booming before I invest in any real estate.…—Dunno, if I had a chance on some lots near the station, said the Armenian from St. Louis.…

There are no more Saratoga chips. We are tired of Japanese beer. Inside, cocktail time is beginning at the bar. I'm alone in the dark under the scrawny palms. From the distance comes the crazy hooting laughter of locomotives.

And Ezekiel too by the river Chebar in the midst of the great mudflats saw angels on wheels:

Their appearance was like burning coals of fire and like the appearance of lamps … and the fire was bright and out of the fire went forth lightning.… The appearance of the wheels and their work was like the color of a beryl, and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel
.

As for their rings they were so high that they were dreadful, and their rings were full of eyes about them four
.

And when the living creatures went the wheels went by them
.

2.
Waters of Babylon

The Scotch engineer very kindly stopped the train for Kut to let me off at Babylon. In the grey plain the single track was two long flashes of sun. In every direction were gravelly hillocks of dust and potsherds that you could imagine to be the traces of walls, blocks of building, ziggaruts. This must have been about 125th Street. Jeremiah certainly had the right dope about Babylon:

And I shall dry up her sea and make her springs dry. And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and an hissing, without an inhabitant
.

And Isaiah:

And Babylon the glory of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldees' excellency shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah
.

It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there:

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there and satyrs shall dance there
.

And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and the dragons in their pleasant places.…

How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased
.

—Morgen, said the leader of a ragged and dusty group of urchins who started to lead me into the downtown district—Bonjour … Babylon me know.… Bloody no good. The others kept up a chorus of Floos, meester, and danced round me with grimy palms upturned, undoubtedly the satyrs of Isaiah. So we proceeded to scramble over rubbishpiles for hours under the noon sun until at last we came, in the region of Times Square, to the Lion Gate and foundations of great paved halls that are supposed to be where Balthazar had his famous feast.

At last, dripping with sweat and with my mouth stopped with dust, I sank down under a palmtree in front of the still backwater that was once the main stream of the Euphrates, wondering at the peculiar effectiveness of the curses that Jeremiah had ordered the “quiet prince” Seraiah to write in a book and tie to a stone and cast into the Euphrates so that the luck of Babylon might sink as the stone sank. Jez I'd like a glass of beer, I muttered half aloud to myself. The urchins, their palms still outstretched, sat in a circle round me—Glas bier, cried the leader of the gang,—subito. And he ran off in the direction of the mud village among the palms.

A little later he came back with a bottle of Münchner Exportbier, cool and beaded, and some dates tied up in a pink bandana. That was one on Jeremiah all right. And it was no mirage. When I had finished that bottle the urchin said hopefully, Noch einmal, and ran off to fetch another. Revivified by Münchner, the hanging gardens began to shake themselves free of the dust. Bel and Mardruk sat once more in their starry chambers at the tops of their skyscraper temples. The sweet-voiced girls of Ishtar began to sing again among the palms. The song they sang was “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.”

After all, if the mere hope of the Baghdad Bahn can make the dustheaps of Babylon flow with Münchner beer … But that certainly was one on the Hebrew prophets.

3.
Declaration of Independence

As in ancient Rome, dawn is the calling hour in Baghdad. Yawning, my guide led me through many lanes that still had the chill of night in them, through narrow crumbling arches, along passages between fissured mudwalls until we came to a flight of steep steps in the thickness of a wall. At the head of the steps I waited in a little dark chamber while the guide went ahead through a Turkish door of inlaid work. He came back in a moment and let me into an empty carpeted room—And the Sheikh Whatshisname? He patted the air with his hand—Shwaya … shwaya.

We sat down in the embrasure of a little window. Below, the Tigris flowed fast and brown, filmed with blue mist—Today, he went on, it is very dangerous for a patriot in Iraq.… We were glad to help the English fight the Turks. But now it is different. The English are like the old man of the sea: at first they are very light, but they get heavier and heavier. And if an important man is opposed to them … shwi … Cokus invites him to tea … and tomorrow he wakes up on the way to Ceylon. This great man we go to see this morning is very much afraid to be invited to tea with Cokus.

At length a boy with a red kerchief on his head ushered us into a long plain hall with rugs on the floor and long cushions round the edges. After the required hesitancy and mamnouning we were settled against the wall at the far end near an old gentleman in dove-grey robes with a beautiful gold and silver beard; we drank coffee and eventually he began to address me through the guide. He spoke in a low warm voice with downcast eyes, occasionally bringing long brown fingers down his beard without touching it. When he paused for the guide to translate he looked hard at us and I noticed that his eyes were blue.