Orient Express (8 page)

6.
Nakhtchevan

Another freightyard, empty this time, except for a long hospital-train. Flies swarm in the stifling heat. The town is several miles away at the end of a scorching sandy road. The engine has disappeared and the few boxcars still remaining on the train seem abandoned. People lie about limply in the patch of shade under the cars. The cars themselves are like ovens. An occasional breath of wind stirs the upper branches of a skinny acacia on the platform beside the shed where tea used to be served out in the old days, but none of the breeze ever seems to reach the freight-yard. The Sayyid, sweating at every pore, is slicing a watermelon that we have to gobble hastily under handkerchiefs to keep the flies from getting ahead of us. Meanwhile the Sayyid delivers a lecture on the virtue and necessity of patience for those engaged in occupations cognate to that of courrier diplomatique. Having eaten all the melon possible, and having definitely discovered that we are due to stay in Nakhtchevan some eight hours more, I climb into the car and cover my head with a sheet against the flies with the faint hope that the heat will stupefy me into sleep. Baste it in the Dutch oven; the phrase somehow bobs up in my mind and the picture of a small boy watching fascinated the process of pouring gravy over the roast chicken, while it is placed against the front of the grate of the stove in a shiny tin onesided contraption. I wonder vaguely if I'm getting the rich sizzly brown the chickens used to get in their Dutch oven. Flies drone endlessly outside the sheet. Their droning resolves itself into the little song they sang in the Paris streets round the time of the signing of the so-called peace:

I' fallait pas, i' fallait pas, i' fallait pa-as y-aller
.

Then from outside comes the voice of the Sayyid in his best style holding forth on pan-Islam and the resurrection of Persia. He must have found a Mussulman. One's head is like a soupkettle simmering on the back of the stove. Thoughts move slowly about in a thick gravy of stupor. Armenia. A second's glimpse of a war map with little flags, Russian, Turkish, British. What a fine game it is. The little flags move back and forth. Livelier than chess. Then the secret intelligence map. Such extraordinary cleverness. We'll exploit the religion of A to make him fight B, we'll buy up the big men of D so that they'll attack A in the rear, then when everybody's down we'll neatly carve up the map. The flies are droning: Carve dat turkey, carve him to de heart. Call the sections Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Turks, Kourds. But somehow when everybody's down they can't find the carving knife. So everybody just stays down and when they get tired of massacring each other they find they are starving. And death and the desert encroach, encroach. Where last year was a wheat field, this year is a patch of thistles, and next year not even thistles will grow there. And the peasants are beggars or bandits. And that's all there is of the map game in the East for the present. But the sheet's in a knot and lets in the flies. I'll climb down to see what the Sayyid's telling his audience.

The Sayyid is saying that the East must settle its own problems, that the Mohammedans of the world must wake from their stupor of acceptance, that they must drive out the foreigners who exploit them, and organize their nations themselves. He says many fine things, but he does not say how the little ragged children, tiny wide-eyed skeletons with hideous swollen bellies, shall be fed, or how the grain shall be bought for the autumn sowing.

There are a dozen of these little children, in all stages of starvation, crawling about under the cars looking for scraps; they are not like animals, because any other animal than man would have long since been dead. The Sayyid has talked to some of them in
turki;
some are of Muslim parents from Ervian; some are Christians from the Lake of Van; some don't know whether their parents were Christian or Muslim, and seem to remember nothing in all their hungry lives, but this freightyard and the scraps of food the soldiers throw to them—This is the eighth month, says the Sayyid. In three months, winter, and they will all die.

7.
Djulfa (August 21, 1921)

That evening politik, as the Sayyid calls it, waxed furious. It came out that the engine could pull only two cars at a time up from Nakhtchevan to Djulfa. The contending parties were the Sayyid and a group of vaguely official Armenians. The station master was enticed into our car and fed tea and cigarettes and, when the doors had been closed to keep out prying eyes, was slipped a couple of paper Turkish pounds. Even then, the thing was not assured until, by a brilliant coup, a doctor, the most important member of the other party, was detached and offered a place in our car. The foiled looked daggers at us as we clanked out of the station behind a spluttering little engine. The moon was almost full. The track wound up through a craggy gorge beside a stream through cool intensely dry mountain air. I sat most of the night on the mysterious packing case beside the open door breathing in the cleanness of the sheer desert rock. Not a blade of grass, no life, no suffering anywhere, only cliffs and great escarped mountains and the stony riverbed, and beyond every upward turn of the valley crouched unimaginably new things, Persia.

And Adjerbeidjan that night slipped from out the shaggy present into the neat daintily colored past, as Armenia had the night we left Bakh-nurashin, and at another station of which I never knew the name, saw, while our nostrils were full of the stench of starving people asleep, and a pipe played sighingly somewhere teased our ears, the last glimmer in the moonlight of the tall disdainful peak of Ararat.

Traintime: Beni Ounif

VI. OF PHAETONS

1.
Garden of Epicurus

—The phaeton is ready, mssiou, said the longnosed waiter with a wave of the hand across the samovar. As he spoke the street outside filled suddenly with the jingling of bells.

When I suggested that the springs stuck into my back the Sayyid was offended in his national pride and sulked until on our way through the bazaar we upset a donkey loaded with clay pots that fell on a heap of watermelons and put everybody in a good humor. The phaeton was vaguely like a small victoria perched above a perilous system of ropes and wheels. It was driven by a stocky man in a white wool cap named Karim. In a little sling behind there crouched among some bags of oats an obscene broad-faced imp that Karim was continually shouting at under the name of Maa'mat. Thus with our legs stuck out over the baggage and our laps full of green and yellow melons and the springs of the seat cunningly gouging the marrow out of our spines we jingled, dragging a great bellying dustcloud like a comet's tail, past the Blue Mosque and out of Tabriz.

The entry into Persia had been made at Djulfa on the Araxes some days before. After the rawness of the death things and birth things of Russia, the balm of an old and feeble and graceful civilization was marvellously soothing. I remember scrambling off the locomotive that had brought us across the international bridge into the tremendous glare of sun of the valley of Djulfa where not a green tree grew among the pink and yellow cliffs that swayed like stage scenery in the heat that boxed it in on every side. Almost immediately we were ushered into a cool room with mud walls of a pinkish puttycolor on which were hung a couple of rugs, and little copper ewers of water were brought, and the Sayyid and I sat with our shoes off before an enormous and epoch-making watermelon being waited on by a tiny little man named Astulla Khan who had one side of his face swollen with toothache and his whole head bound about with a white cloth tied at the top so as to leave two long pointed ends the way people's faces used to be done up in the picturebooks of a hundred years ago. Then after lunch when mattresses had been brought and great pink cylindrical pillows, we lay drowsily through an endless afternoon, looking at the smooth mud ceiling and at the portrait of the Shah woven in one of the rugs on the wall, and out into the court where a tame partridge strutted about the edge of a little pool and where a kitten lay prone on a patch of blue and crimson rug in the sunlight. There was not a sound except for very occasionally the discreet bubbling of Astulla Khan's waterpipe from the next room. One felt endless ages of well-modulated indolence settling like fine silk cloths over one's restlessness. Perhaps this was the garden beyond pain and pleasure where Epicurus whiled away passionless days. At last the kitten got up, stretched each white leg in turn and strolled without haste over to the pool. The sunlight was already ruddy and cast long shadows. The hills beyond the Araxes were bright rose with purple and indigo shadows. The Sayyid got to his feet, dusted his trousers and muttered meditatively—Quel théâtre! Whereupon Astulla Khan appeared staggering under an enormous shining samovar and the business of the day was on again.

Out of the plain of Tabriz we climbed a dry pass and ate our own dust up a long incline until another valley full of poplartrees and mudwalled villages opened up at our feet and we found ourselves rattling and bouncing down hill again. At Basmich where we lunched there was a memorable garden. It was there the Sayyid first got lyrical. We sprawled under silvery aspens in a garden full of green grass and little shining watercourses and a boy with his hair cut a little below the ears like a pageboy out of the Middle Ages, wearing a tight belted tunic and straight loose pants of bright blue, brought us tea and a lapful of red apples. Then the Sayyid sat bolt upright and half closed his eyes and chanted in droning cadence the poem of Hafiz I have since found in Miss Bell:

“A flower-tinted cheek, the flowery close

Of the fair earth, these are enough for me
—

Enough that in the meadow wanes and grows

The shadow of a graceful cypress tree.

I am no lover of hypocrisy;

Of all the treasures that the earth can boast

A brimming cup of wine I prize the most
—

This is enough for me!”

—Quel théâtre! cried the Sayyid when he had finished and put a piece of sugar in his mouth and lay back with his hands spread in the soft grass.

2.
The Shah's Wrestler

That night after a run through valleys sheening with poplars with a long range of eroded crimson mountains always to the left of us, we stopped in a dilapidated khan beside a very large beautifully built brick caravanserai, ruined now, of the type the road people always ascribe to the good Shah Abbas. The name of the place was Shibli and there we found a company of roadguards under the leadership of a mighty man of war, Hakim Sultan. Hakim Sultan was a stocky man wreathed in cartridge belts. He squatted in the most honorable corner of the room, pulling on a waterpipe, and looked out benignantly at us from small piglike eyes embedded in flesh. His hair and his drooping moustaches were dyed crimson with henna. Between prodigious suckings that made the water in the galian bubble like mad he told us that he had once wrestled before the Shah during Ramadan and had thrown all his opponents. With a rifle he was a dead shot. And Hakim Sultan's subordinates, fine lanky nomads a little less swathed in cartridge belts than their captain, who squatted about at a respectful distance, nodded confirmation like so many Chinese toys. Why, just five days ago in this very khan he had beaten off untold numbers of the Shahsivan. We were duly shown the bulletholes in the wall. It was admitted that the raiders had managed to make off with all the cattle in the place—But I drove them back into the hills. I sat and shot from this very place. One could imagine him squatting with his rifle, handling it as he handled his galian. Ah the Shahsivan, they were mighty men! Eleven of them had once disarmed a thousand Russian soldiers sent against them with artillery. They lived so far in the mountains a man who knew the road would have forgotten it by the time he reached their country. Their teacups and their youghourt bowls were of solid gold and they never counted the number of their camels. Such were the men, he, Hakim Sultan, spent his life in fighting.

At this point the oration was interrupted by the appearance of the host with a squawking chicken in each hand. Alternately they were presented to the Sayyid, who prodded and pinched them with a look of unearthly wisdom on his face. At last one was chosen and one rejected and the squawks brought to an abrupt end by the penknife of one of the nomads. Then, while from outside came hopeful sizzlings, the Sayyid took his turn. He described the countries of the earth from Berlin to Stamboul and their state and the condition of their politik, and how some were good and others bad and others, notably Turkey and the Bolsheviki,
tamaam,
finished.

Later he explained to me that he did not think either Turkey or the Bolsheviki
tamaam,
but that he wanted to counteract their propaganda—Diplo-o-omatik! he said, drawing out the word with the wave of an extended brown hand. When we had eaten bread and youghourt and cheese and chicken washed down with many tiny swagbellied glasses of tea, we rolled up in our blankets on the floor beside the window, through the unglazed lattice of which whistled the good keen air of mountain passes. I noticed the Sayyid sitting up after I had turned in, looking apprehensively back and forth between his moneybag he held in his hand and the prone form of Hakim Sultan. But we slept undisturbed in the Shibli pass.