Orient Express (13 page)

In America, he had heard, we had had a great Sheikh Washiton who had written a book declaring the independence of America from the Inglizi many years ago. Since then we had so far followed the precepts of the Prophet as to believe in one God only and to prohibit the drinking of wine. All this was very good. And now in the big European powderplay we had sent another great Sheikh, Meester Veelson, who had declared in the Fourteen Points at Baries that all nations were free, equal and independent. This was good, too. If such had not been the will of God he would have created one nation and not many.

The Arab nation, made up of believers dwelling in Baghdad and Damascus, had gladly helped the Inglizi and Fransawi to drive out the Osmanli who were oppressors and now were anxious to remain at peace and friendly with all the world, according to the words of Meester Veelson. But the Allies had not acted according to the words of Meester Veelson nor according to the principles of Sheikh Jurij Washiton. This was not good. Arab patriots had been driven out and imprisoned by the Fransawi in Damascus, and now the Inglizi, breaking their plighted word, were trying to make slaves of the people of Iraq. The Inglizi thought they could treat the Arabs of Baghdad and Busra and Damascus as they had treated the people of Hind. They would find that the Arabs were of stiffer stuff. They had tried to deceive them with mock kingdoms, when the lowest porter in the bazaars knew that Feisul and Abdullah, even the King of the Hedjaz himself for all his holding the holy cities, had no power outside of the guns of the Inglizi.

The Americai must tell his countrymen that the people of Iraq would continue to struggle for their freedom and for the principles announced by Sheikh Washiton and Meester Veelson. The last revolt had failed because it had been ill prepared. Next time … His voice rose ever so slightly.

When we got up to go he led us to the door. I asked my guide to ask about the plebiscite. The old man laughed. Oh yes, they had given out papers in the bazaars, but they were already printed with the vote for the mandate, so that the ignorant should vote for the government without knowing it. But only the Jews had voted and a few ignorant people; what man who knew his letters and the law would demean himself by voting anyway?

Oh, self-determination, where is thy sting?

4.
Misadventures with a Consul

What with the mirage and the difficulty of following the road through the breaks in old watercourses the representative of the Screaming Eagle and myself arrived in Samarrah very late, after driving the Ford all afternoon over the naked pebbly plain of
the land the rivers have spoiled,
where you continually pass the mounds of crumbled cities and towers. It was almost dark when we crossed on the crazy ferry and saw in the distance the silhouette of the great ziggarut, like the tower of Babel in ancient illustrated bibles. Close on our heels came the Adviser in his high-powered car to find out what the devil we were up to. We all went to the house of the kaimakom, where we were given rooms freshly furnished in chintzy European style by Maple's. Dinner was a splendid affair. The climax of the evening came when the kaimakom, much exhilarated by ardent spirits (it is wine the Koran forbids) anointed all our heads with brilliantine. The representative of the Screaming Eagle was a very tall man who neither drank nor smoked. He sat bolt upright with an untasted glass of arrak in his hand and brilliantine running down his face while the kaimakom gave him a shampoo. The Adviser, who had brought his own whisky and had submitted cheerfully to the operation, leaned back in his chair as red as a turkeygobbler. It was a fine dinner.

It was on the way back to Baghdad the next afternoon that we definitely lost the way. When night came on our gas had run out. We were stalled in some tracks that might have been a road, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. After a great deal of palaver, for it was not supposed to be safe outside of the towns after nightfall, we left the representative of the Screaming Eagle eating a watermelon and went off in search of a fairly mythical village where we could perhaps find a can of gasoline.

Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto: a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled
.

It's fantastic how this country is saturated with the Bible, how these desolate mudflats and rubbishheaps are scorched and seared by the cursing tongues of the Hebrew prophets.

Well, the consular servant, Abdullah, and I started out to look for a can of gas. He was a weazened brown worriedfaced man with a long crouching stride. We walked east away from the road towards some faint lights that might be a village. It was curious, walking over the pitted surface of the plain. There were stars, but they didn't seem to give any light. A cool dusty wind occasionally blew in our faces, a wind that smelled of nothing. Through vacancy from which shape and color and smell had withdrawn as a snail withdraws into its shell we walked and walked. Without speaking we walked and walked. Abdullah put his hand on my arm. We stopped dead. The ground dropped away under our feet. I remembered having seen some quarries or limepits somewhere on the ride up the day before. Through the gloom we made out a flicker of light. We smelled woodsmoke. Slipping and scrambling, we got down the incline into a muddy bottom of some sort, Abdullah walked ahead and I followed as best I could. We stopped before a burning kiln. The smoke eddied about us. Not finding anybody, we went on climbing up to the level of the plain again. We began to hear the barking of pariah dogs; as we drew nearer the village the dogs got our wind and came towards us, yelling in a pack. We made out some, mud huts and walked among them with the dogs yapping and snarling at our heels.

Teahouse: Teheran

An old man stuck his head sleepily out of a door and showed us the track towards Kazimain. For a long while we followed the road until it disappeared and left us stumbling over the jagged surface of the plain again. This was discouraging. It may have been an hour before we found ourselves walking along a railroad track. Good old Baghdad Bahn! It might have been the Willimantic Air Line. Eventually we came to a station. It was dark, but a road led east again from it. The road went through a Sepoy bivouac. To pipe and muffled drum, soldiers were dancing among the high-flaring campfires. Kazimain, said Abdullah, putting one hand on my shoulder and stretching the other towards the horizon.

At Kazimain we made a knocking to wake the dead on the portals of the Persian Consulate. At length the Consul himself, in carpet slippers, backed up by his retainers with lamps, appeared in the door. He must have thought the perfidious Inglizi were coming to assassinate him. When he heard of the plight of his colleague of the Screaming Eagle he wrung his hands and ordered out his own limousine. We sped along the road to take help to the stranded consul and stopped only when the road ended at the edge of a deep pit. The Persian consul's chauffeur shook his head between his hands. He could go no farther. So the relief party started out on foot again, scrambling through gullies and ravines until, very tired, and each with a bidon of gas in one hand, we came again to the burning limekiln. At last we found the tracks of the Ford on a path. We shouted and yodeled. The yelling packs of dogs answered us from the horizons. Abdullah picked up a watermelon rind. The car had gone. Undoubtedly this was where it had been. Slowly, with a sense of gathering doom, he pieced together the whole melon. We strained our eyes to make it out in the starlight. Yes it had the markings of the melon the Consul Sahib had been eating when we left him. The car had gone, carried off by raiders, maybe. Abdullah squatted by the side of the road. He would wait there till the morning. I left him sitting beside the two bidons of gasoline and started to walk into Baghdad.

Walking along the dusty tracks, taking care to follow the ruts, is like walking through a dream you can't remember. The multitude of unfamiliar stars. The plain is terribly dark and empty in spite of the stars. The plain is crowded under its emptiness. Noise is shivering under the silence, ready to burst into the crazy yelling of pariah dogs.
Land shadowing with wings … a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled
.

X. THE STONY DESERT OF DAMASCUS

—What, you never ate a prairie oyster? cried the Major. Never—Then you shall by heaven, before the evening's out. And so it happened after we had given everybody airplane rides blindfolded on a board, even to the cook and all the bearahs and one little man they dragged in off the street, and while we were swallowing our prairie oysters and taking a last nip of Scotch, rifle shots started snapping somewhere towards the edge of town. Someone looked out of the window into the rainy square and said,—Dear me, they seem to be firing. After I had gone to bed above the lisp of rain trickling down mudwalls I could hear an occasional shot shiver the cadence of the rain like a breaking glass.

At breakfast over the bacon and eggs it transpired that a raid had been made on the sarai, the government house, and that the safe had been carried away—Never mind, I know who did it, said the Adviser; he's a good friend of mine. I'll have him locked up before night. Those damn native levies are probably in league with him. I'll settle him. We had hardly finished our last cup of tea when a young man dressed in a fine Persian aba of camel's hair, with an expensive pink agal so heavily bound with gold thread that it would not stay straight but balanced ridiculously awry on his head, came stamping in with much ceremony. He said he was the son of the naqib of Madina and a relative of Malik Feisul, and gave what was afterwards explained to me to be an animated description of the heroic stand the caravan camp had made against the raiders. He also said it was too wet for the camels to start and that we were to spend yet another day looking at the crumbled mudwalls and the date gardens of Romadi. Tomorrow if God willed.… Bukra insh'allah.

Then the Aviator and the Intelligence Man and myself were prevailed upon to visit the young man with the pink-gilt agal in his tent and I was made to ride out on a led horse with red tassels on the bridle. In the tent, that was an English tent bought in Baghdad, we sat on sheepskins and drank tea and ate Turkish paste and I fingered my list of Arabic words like a breviary. Bronzefaced people gradually seeped in, made polite ejaculations and were silent. Tallow smell of sheepskins. Flash of eyes, teeth, brown toes along the edges of a Persian rug and lean dry hands motionless among the folds of abas, and a rakish man with a black beard passing little swell-bottomed glasses of tea, that the young man with the pink-gilt agal, who turned out to be the Sayyid Mohamet, clogged with condensed milk with his own hands as an especial treat. Eventually we escaped to the open air again after a great deal of bowing and scraping on both sides and went back to chairs, whisky and soda and luncheon. In the afternoon the indefatigable Sayyid Mahomet reappeared and dragged me round to the coffee houses and cigarette shops of the small brick bazaar down towards the Euphrates. We squatted on cane benches, grinning at each other, speechless as apes, and watched the flies glinting in the sun above a muddy alley outside, and drank tiny cups of coffee black as night and perfumed with some herb or other, the herb of delay perhaps that induces the bittersweet drowse into which one falls waiting for steamers to coal and roads to dry and streams to become fordable and caravans to start. Tomorrow, insh'allah, if God willed, we would start for Damascus across the desert.

And what should appear, wheezing and popping through the ruts and puddles, but the rusty Ford that had brought me from Baghdad across the mudflats that lie between the rivers'? The Sayyid was immediately agog with it and after a great deal of discussion we set out through drizzly rain, lurching and clattering through puddles, spluttering down narrow lanes, frightening old women and chickens, making horses rear and break their halters. Half the population of the café had piled in, grave men in brown robes with beards like Micah and Ezekiel stood on the running-boards, little urchins hoisted up their gowns about their shoulders and ran after us, and every time the motor backfired everybody rolled up his eyes and cried, alham'd 'ullah, Praise be to God. At last when we had twice circumnavigated the walls and date gardens and the tumbled cemeteries of Romadi, the engine gave a final frantic explosion, there was a horrid buckling snarl from the differential, and the car stopped. The driver took off his tarboosh and wailed and everybody roared with laughter. Took the opportunity to slip back into Europe through a breach in the wall to the British officers' mess, where I sat reading the
Strand
until it was time for whiskys and sodas again.

After dinner and talk about irrigation schemes and uprisings I set out with two men with lanterns to find the caravan camp. A rainy wind was howling in our faces and continually blew out the lanterns, and we expected to find a raider in every patch of grey in the shrill blackness of the night. Eventually we heard a man singing and there came on the wind the growl and sharp smell of camels. The Britishers' servants left me in my tent in the care of an obsequious and soiled man named Fahad who set up my bed with great skill and bowed himself out. Then one Saleh, a crookednosed youth in an English army coat, came in and said with a fine cockney twang:—Me speak bloody English, messboy bloody English camp. Me boy take care seecamels. Then he stopped and with the greatest delicacy and good humor began to say it over again—Do we go tomorrow? I interrupted him. He rolled up his eyes, gargled an insh'allah and left me. I sat on my cot and looked about. The tent was crimson inside, with little decorations of hearts and diamonds on the flaps. It was round at the top, tapering to a single pole, and hexagonal at the bottom and gave me the feeling of being a worm in a fuchsia flower. Rain had come up and beat a gentle tattoo on the roof. I got undressed slowly, listening to the extraordinary bubbling and groaning of the camels. At last here was an end of colonies and whisky and soda and the
Strand
and canned goods and the American Bar on Tigris bank and the soldier-littered rail-scarred dumping grounds of the West. I wrapped myself in my striped Tabriz and blew out the candle. The rain beat harder on the sag of the tent over my head. People on guard round the camp called to each other at intervals with a long gruffening call. Once there were some shots far away. And just outside my tent someone was crooning a frail circular snatch of song over and over again. Something about Ali Asgar, Ali Afgar, dead at Kerbela. The word dead, Miut, I recognized because coming up from Baghdad we had passed the body of a Hindoo boy beside the road lying on its back with a stony smile, and Jassem had come back to the car from looking at it, had shaken his beard and said, Miut, and we had driven on. And listening to the song and the bubbling of the camels and the beat of the rain I went to sleep.