Orient Express (17 page)

This Turk did not like the Arabs a bit, said they were a low and shifty lot. Neither did he like History nor the Germans nor Baghdad nor the British. He had been in the Turkish army during the war, had deserted, had three times been stripped naked and left for dead by the Bedawi. He had wandered to all sorts of inconceivable places, always trying to get home to some village near Brusa. Everywhere everybody had too many guns and there was no law.

All this went on for a long time, and nobody seemed much the worse for it, until at last Jassem stood on the mound and waved a long white sleeve in the direction of the attackers and everybody began to say that they were friends after all.

The raiders rode into camp on their lolloping ponies, gaunt men tanned black by the wind, riding in pairs, singing as they came. Their clothes were ragged and dirty, looped up with cartridge belts. Ibn Haremis is their name or the name of their sheikh and they belong to the Fede'an.

I sit shivering among my baggage in a cold wind that has just come up to spite us. Opposite me the Damascus merchants are dejectedly raising their tent. Tall desert people stalk haughtily through the camp. They have just made off with a rug belonging to the Damascus people who are setting up a great outcry. Fahad is cooking me supper, cursing under his breath. Jassem and Hassoon sit impassively by their fire grinding coffee. Their eyes shining under their headcloths follow every movement of their friends of ibn Haremis the way the eyes of a cornered cat will watch a dog.

Twenty-third Day:
This is goddam tiresome. Here we are sitting on our tails again, discussing safety money. This ibn Haremis gang is a rare one. They've all been sitting in my tent looking at me and my blankets and the hippo, and numerous other things that people have brought to my tent for safekeeping. Such a set of walleyed, crooknosed, squinting, oneeyed, scarfaced cutthroats and slitpurses I have never seen. They go through all my possessions with gimlet eyes, and their hands feeling my blankets seem glued with greed to every fiber. I made a fatal error; they invited me to go see their sheikh and for some reason I was sore at them and refused. I don't know why, because I imagine they'd be very good fellows if you got to know them. May have unpleasant consequences, though. So I sulk in my tent with all the blankets wrapped about me and curse the wind and this blithering plateau and think of hot baths and steaks smothered in onions. Still it was worth it to hear their carolling song as they rode in pairs on white lolloping ponies into the conquered camp.

Twenty-fourth Day:
Five camels and five pounds Turkish as ransom for the hippo was the khowa decided on, and now ibn Haremis is our friend and brother. Incidentally last night several old women appeared and sat round the fire and raised their voices in the discussion equally with the men. This morning the merry men saw us on our way. Great relief was manifested on all sides when our friends and brethren ceased to protect us and returned to their tents. During the day we kept crossing rocky wind-tortured ridges between flat patches of sandy desert. At sunset I thought I saw the mountains of Syria lying purple athwart the sun, but at dawn there was no sign of them.

Twenty-fifth Day:
We were navigating splendidly this morning in the face of the perpetual westerly wind when some of Abdullah's ridiculous mules had to get lost in a tangle of dry watercourses. So we sat down beside a waterhole in a delicious sheltered valley, the Sheib War, with only half a day accomplished. Had the first wash in a week in a smooth sun-filled cave in the cliff where I lay a long time on the warm rock while my clothes were airing, reading Juvenal, to whom I don't kindle, notwithstanding his gorgeous turgid flow of indignant imagery. I smell rhetoric in him. Hope I left a few fleas behind in that rocky cave. It's terribly annoying to be cold and fleabitten at the same time. The mules are caught again and come with a great scampering and clattering up the canyon. Bukra insh'allah, we'll see the mountains of Syria and the Jebal Druse.

Twenty-sixth Day:
Feel rather like the anonymous Wise Man who got there too late to offer myrrh or frankincense. Goddam cold and I don't care who knows it. Doubt if I was ever colder in my life. All day rode in a bitter wind under a bright sky over terrific uplands of sharp glinting flints. About the first real continuous desert; no trace of vegetation. All our fires are of dry camel dung, jelle, collected from an old camping place we passed. Here we are camped under a cairn at the head of Wadi Mia which is diversely said to be four and eight days from Damascus. Shiver and pray for supper. Fleas.

Twenty-seventh Day:
Have a sort of suspicion that this is Christmas Day, but as I'm not quite sure what the date was when I left Baghdad, I may have calculated wrong. Ate kastowi for lunch, rice with my last onions for supper. Cold as blazes. Long desolate ride over purple hills strewn with sharp flints into a wind colder and sharper than all the flints from here to Jericho. This must be the highest part of the hogback, as there comes in the rain an occasional spit of sleet. Put my foot in it terribly this evening. Was taking my habitual before-supper stroll to the highest hill round about the camp, and had paused on the crest to look down through grey smudges of mist into the vast putty-colored wilderness ahead of us. In front of me, standing out against the last silvery light like monsters of an eocene world, two camels were making love, twining their snaky necks together with flopping slobbering lips and groanings through yellow teeth. Clumsily, sensitively under the aluminum twilight the act was accomplished. I had climbed on a rock to see further, when I saw Jassem running up the slope with his fieldglasses in his hand, hallooing desperately. I went down to him and found him wild. All day the caravan had been manoeuvring to keep out of sight of some black tents pitched in the next valley and there I was standing like a monument on top of the hill, visible for a day's journey in every direction. He vented his wrath, and I my shame, by throwing stones at the camels and driving them back to camp.

Twenty-eighth Day:
Bitter rain in misty squalls. A North Sea day with nary a glimpse of sun. Rode from before dawn till after dark through howling flinty wilderness. The Agail laugh at me at night sitting round the fire because the stinging smoke of jelle makes my eyes water. Hassoon can hold his face almost to the flame in the thickest of the smoke without a flicker of his eyelids. Held high discourse about America. It seems that some of the Agail have been there and come back with the word that it was a land full of floos. The coffee we were drinking came from Santos, so everybody thought I lived where the coffee came from. Everyone wondered at the great iron ships going over the sea; and sitting there in the desert round the glowing fire of cameldung under a night of unfathomable misty blackness, we felt the suction of the great machine, the glint of whirring nickel, the shine of celluloid and enamel, the crackle of banknotes fingered in banks, the click and grinding of oiled wheels. I made a great speech and said that if I had any sense I would live in the desert with the Agail and never go back; but they took it as a compliment and did not understand. Jassem asked me, then, what kind of a hakim I was in my country, a great man like Cokus? No not quite.

The Hadji has no luck. He slept in my tent last night as it was very wet outside, and naturally the tent had to blow down and half the camels to stampede, so that the poor old gentleman was forgotten and trampled on and finally picked prone and groaning from under the collapsed bed. And the umbrella underwent further injuries.

My shoes are split and I have chilblains.

Twenty-ninth Day:
Stuck again. Fifteen camels lame from the heavy going of the last few days. Shivered in wet tents all day. Sat all afternoon in the tent of the Sayyid, while his cook Hadji Mahomet told stories. I could not follow them at all, but they began with such pomaded suaveness of Once upon a time there lived … and worked up to such pitch of excitement where everybody cried Ei Wallah and Allah and wallowed in such smutty chortlings when all hands wriggled in their places and curled up their brown toes with delight that it was almost as if I had understood the words. Then the Damascus merchant's little boy sang and everybody ate dates and drank tea. Between the verses of love-songs everyone cries Allah and groans in a most melancholy manner.

Thirtieth Day:
Began in mist and despair. Then phantom hills to the west seemed to promise Syria and its fleshpots, and the sun came out and the immense disk of purple flint shone like a shattered mirror.

Thirty-first Day:
Splendid frosty morning. Interminably westward across this petrified sea of flints. Continually hungry. Hours before noon I start thinking of the taste of kastowi, a delicious molasses-brown concoction of ewe's butter and dates fried up together, and in the evening I massacre the rice and bread almost without tasting it. Last night I dreamed of dining at the Bristol in Marseilles, of eating the crackly brown skin of roast goose. It makes me feel terribly soft. No one else seems to mind half rations. The Arabs are the most frugal people I ever consorted with.

Thirty-second Day:
Half day on. Camels low, as there has been no food for several days. Let 'em take a thousand years to get to Damascus. I don't care. I'll never sit about such fragrant fires again, or with such fine people. Christ, I feel well, bearded, fullblooded, all the bile out of my belly, all the wrinkles ironed out of my mind by the great cold purple flinty flatiron of the desert.

The Sayyid and Damascus Saleh have had a row, I don't know what about.

Thirty-third Day:
A new wind has come up, Hawa Esch Scham, the wind of Damascus, they call it. Everything is pink and warm colored like the ears of a jackrabbit seen for a second against the sun. We have made a splendid camp on a shiah-covered slope. At the end of a trough to the northwest are tall promontory hills jutting into the desert, the actual hills of Syria. Beyond them is Tidmor that I am not fated to see—Alas, Zenobia. Shoes split, feet chilblained, hands stiff with cold, but jolly as a lark. Wish I had a rum punch, hot, with a slice of lemon and two cloves.

Thirty-fourth Day:
Through rocky defiles and over patches of sandy desert with the hills of Syria gathering like a herd of cattle to the west. This afternoon we were almost held up again. Two of the Agail sighted guns and headcloths at the opening of a deep ravine the trail leads through, so in a jiffy the caravan did a right-about-face, and went off to the south, while the grandees on their dromedaries rode on towards the ambuscade with their guns cocked. These people wore various-colored headcloths and were from the Jebal Druse. I don't think they were actually Druses, but rabble from the outskirts, half Bedawi and half Druse. They asked to see the mad Frank who was wandering about the desert, and upon my being produced looked at me critically but amiably. A lot of big talk followed. They were finally bought off with fifteen pounds Turkish and a sack of dates. I don't think they could have done us much mischief anyway as few of them were mounted.

Thirty-fifth Day:
We are riding between two ranges of barren mountains, pink and ochre and purple and indigo in the shadows, reflected in long streaks of stagnant water that leaves where it dries the sand cracked and mottled like alligator hide. Now that we are out of danger from the Bedawi everybody is worried about the French camel corps, as there is a duty on tobacco and camels and the game is to smuggle through. How a caravan of five hundred camels can slip into Damascus unnoticed is beyond me, but one should never deny wonders. Everybody is restless and excited like the last day out on an ocean liner.

Thirty-sixth Day:
All things have come to pass. We are camped over against Dmair, huddled in a little hollow of the hills. We are in Syria. Blue smoke goes up from the village and is lost in the blue of the ridges in front of Lebanon. Further south the Jebal Sheikh sits hunched and hoary. There are goats and flocks of sheep grazing round about the camp. I'd like to go to Dmair, but Jassem won't let me for fear of waking the drowsy customs officers. Various inhabitants of Dmair are coming out to us on camels and donkeys, however. I almost wish we were still out in the desert, leaving instead of arriving, but oh, for a hot bath and food, food, food.

Thirty-seventh Day:
O those Sayyids. The unforgettable entry into Damascus.

Last night the caravan camp was full of goings and comings, deep talk round Jassem's fire, and groaning and bubbling of camels. The last thing I heard as I went to sleep was the clink of money, gold pounds Turkish being counted from palm into palm. In the morning when I woke up the camp looked as if a cyclone had struck it. Half the camels, most of the bales of tobacco and rugs and, I imagine, opium had vanished in blue haze. Jassem sat quietly grinding his coffee, occasionally stroking his black beard. As I was drinking coffee with him he gently insinuated the thought that when I talked with the French in Damascus I should not know how many camels nor how we had come. I told him I had a bad head for figures.

Then Abdullah's white stallion was brought up and I perched my galled posterior on an execrable saddle and we were off towards Damascus, I on my stallion, the Sayyid on his dromedary, the Sayyid's cook on a skittish white camel, and one of the Agail on foot to put us on the road. That morning seemed endless. We kept losing the road, first over shaggy uplands and then in a fat valley full of pasture lands, patches of green sesame and alfalfa, apple orchards, pink adobe houses. Eventually the Sayyid took pity on my agonized bouncing on the stirrupless stallion and let me ride his dromedary. The white camel did not like the smell of civilization and kept trying to bolt back to the desert. At last, deliriously hungry, galled, limping, tired to a frazzle, we got to a village where we left our beasts in the inn, ate all too frugally of beans and cheese and kebab, and then drove, lolling like Zeus in his chariot of eagles, in a landau into Damascus. Then before I could put food to my mouth or water to my skin I had to go to see all the Sayyid's relatives, old men with beards in the Scribes' bazaar, people in mysterious courtyards who were adherents of Feisul's and plotting against the French, a tailor in a tailor shop, the keeper of a café frequented by the Agail; with all these, interminable scraping and mamnouning, until at last we found ourselves in contact with the forces of civilization. We had left the cab outside a café where we were palavering busily, I too dazed with hunger and unwashedness to know what was going on; on coming out we found a drunken French officer sitting in it. The Sayyid protested that it was our cab and the Frenchman started spouting abuse, and the Sayyid drew his little dagger and there would have been the devil to pay if the Frenchman had not hazily realized that I was talking French to him. He immediately apologized profusely and embraced the Sayyid in the name of the Allies and we all rode off together singing “la Madelon de la Victoire” to a most Parisian ginmill in the main square. The Sayyid sat outside while we Occidentals went in and drank I don't know how many glasses of absinthe in the name of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. In a pink indeterminate and vaguely swishing cloud I drove to the hotel, somehow got rid of the Frenchman and the Sayyid, and at last was alone sprawling buoyant in a warm bath that tasted of absinthe, smelled of absinthe, swished and simmered drowsily, tingled pinkly with absinthe.