A Traveller's Life (27 page)

The garrison consisted of a sergeant, a corporal and six troopers. They were dressed in long, almost ankle-length khaki tunics or coats with collars that buttoned to the neck, and red-and-white checked head-cloths
(mandil)
which were kept in place by a black cord (the
agal
or
maasub
). They were constantly fingering their head-cloths and never seemed to have them adjusted to their satisfaction. Around their waists they wore bright red sashes and they carried .38 Colt revolvers in holsters. The sentry on the gate was armed with a rifle. All of them were swathed in red leather bandoliers stuffed with ammunition, and in their belts they wore extremely sharp, silver-mounted daggers ornamented with semi-precious stones or glass, it was difficult to tell which.

Who had invented this extraordinary, romantic, dashing rig? Glubb Pasha, perhaps. Whoever it was, I half expected some British officer, fluent in Arabic, with a David Niven moustache, some good Second
World War decorations, cherry-red trousers, desert boots, Viyella shirt and cavalry hat, to appear and start telling us about the warlike virtues of his ‘chaps'. No one appeared. They seemed to be autonomous.

We were borne off by these walking ammunition dumps to drink coffee which they dispensed with effortless courtesy under an awning. They were a tough-looking lot, but like policemen everywhere when one comes on them with an aura of respectability (they had been forewarned of our arrival), they were extremely friendly.

They were all Beduin. ‘No one else would stand it,' said the Copt, who was from the city; but by Beduin standards their life must have been heaven. Their kith and kin were close at hand in the long, low tents that were pitched just outside the wire. If domestic life became too much for them they could always retire into the fort until things improved. At the very worst they could volunteer for the patrol. It seemed a perfect arrangement.

Beyond the fort, in a sort of bay in the cliffs which here ran back in a deep rift, there was an encampment of a dozen or so tents of the Howeitat Beduin, who in this region numbered some eight hundred. The base of the cliffs was a chaos of rocks, some of them as big as a double-decker bus. From among these gargantuan heaps small trees sprouted. The air was filled with strange ululating noises, the cries of the herdsboys calling to the goats which infested the screes. The tent on the extreme right of the encampment was that of the sheikh, as was the custom. It was pitched close to the remains of a Nabatean temple, and while we were grubbing aimlessly among the ruins for potsherds, he sent word inviting us to visit him.

There, in the sheikh's tent, under the cool, porous goat-hair cloth which his women had woven, and with the side curtains cunningly adjusted against the sun, we squatted down, drawing our legs under us in the prescribed fashion, rolling about oafishly on the tribal rugs in our tight trousers, exposing our enormous Western feet.

More coffee was produced – here in Wadi Rumm I felt myself slowly drowning in it – poured from a tall pot that stood among the embers. It had a curved spout that made it look like an
art nouveau
bird. The coffee was delicious, better than that of the police, unsweetened and flavoured with cardamom.

The sheikh, Ayid Awad Zalabin, was a splendidly remote-looking man. It was difficult to guess his age. It could have been anything from fifty to seventy; but whatever it was, his children were both small and numerous and they stood in the sun outside the tent, potbellies showing under short shifts, sucking their thumbs and gazing in at these weird visitors until, at a word from him, they scattered and hid. From behind the curtains came vague, female noises.

After an exchange of courtesies, which took some time as they had to be translated backwards and forwards, I showed the sheikh some photographs of the Howeitat riding out to battle, taken at the time of the Arab Revolt; and another of Auda Abu Tayi (chief of the Howeitat at that time, better known to filmgoers as Anthony Quinn) and of his son who, at the time it was taken, was twelve years old, and was still alive.

The sheikh expressed interest in them, but less than I imagined he would, and when I offered to give them to him he declined them. Even the spitting images of men and things dead and gone were of no consequence to him. He was only interested in them when expressed in words, as a story handed down, or else simply as a memory.

High above the tents, in the mouth of a rift in the mountain, there was a spring that supplied the fort with water through a long pipe which grew hotter and hotter as the sun climbed overhead. Above it on the rocks, a small band of men were rebuilding the Nabatean conduit which, in ancient times, had led down to a well near the temple. Whether they were doing this for practical reasons or as a tourist attraction was difficult to say.

The way to the spring, which was called el Shellala, wound upwards among the rocks past fig trees brutally hacked by the Beduin in their everlasting search for fuel, dwarf acacias and wild watermelon shrubs, the small fruit of which lay among the rocks as light as ping-pong balls, dried out and filled with black seeds that rattled when one shook them. On the path big black beetles pushed doggedly at bits of goat dung, stashing them away.

Until the pipe had been put in to connect the spring to the fort the water had spouted into a basin cut in the rock, but now that the pipe had been cemented in, it only emerged as a trickle. Yet it was still an enchanting place, a rare place in the wilderness, overhung with fern and deliciously cool in the shadow of the cliffs. It was here, while bathing after the ride to Wadi Rumm from Guweira, that Lawrence met the crazy old Beduin who cried out, ‘The Love of God is from God; and of God; and towards God,' interrupting his bath and using the word love in a conjunction that Lawrence had believed Semites to be incapable of. Later, in the camp, he had tried to make him expound further but the old man uttered nothing but groans and broken words and afterwards he went away.

From the top of the ledge above the spring, ravines a thousand feet deep that were like narrow trenches, led away into the mysterious heart of Jebel Rumm. Here and there the rain of centuries had worn cup-like depressions in the rocks. Someone, probably a Howeitat herdsboy, had baited them with seeds and then balanced flat stones above them on sticks, so that a bird touching one of them would bring the stone crashing down and be trapped.

But now there was not a bird or beast to be seen. The place was utterly silent. And there was no echo. I shouted up into the ravines and against the walls of the cliffs and the sounds died instantly. It was like shouting into a blanket or in a storm, when the wind whips the words away and they are gone.

When I went to East Africa for the first time in 1967 I took with me
Hints to Travellers
, published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1937, which was full of useful information, such as:

In the Ruwenzori it was customary to give the porters a Cerebos salt tin full of
bulo
flour, besides salt and blankets. This corresponds to a native measure, a
kiraba
. Loads are made up to 45 lbs, rather less than the weights of loads carried on safari in the plains … Cutters who make a way in advance of the porters often go off at right angles to the direction indicated, either because the path is easier or for some reason known only to themselves.

Things had changed a bit in Africa since this was written. No one walked more than a few feet on the modern, motorized, packaged safaris; no African carried a minimal 45 lbs of your belongings on his noddle; no one gave anyone a
kiraba
of
bulo
any more; and instead of employing wood cutters to clear a way to the extraordinary Ruwenzori mountains you could contemplate them from the neighbourhood of the Mountains of the Moon Hotel at Fort Portal in Uganda – Telegram address ‘Romance'. ‘Cracking
log fires. Nine-hole golf course. Pygmy village. Hot springs in which an egg is perfectly boiled by nature.' (Did you whisper ‘four minutes please' as you dropped it in and hope for a piece of African magic?)

It is one's first encounter with wild animals, other than animals in cages, that really sticks in the mind, however banal the circumstances. In my case, in Africa, my first exposure to them took place after Sunday curry at the Outspan Hotel at Nyeri, a morning's drive north of Nairobi in the lands of the, until fairly recently, not all that friendly Kikuyu tribe. We piled into Land-Rovers – not really necessary for such a trip but they gave an atmosphere – and set off for Treetops, the lodge at the foot of the Aberdare Range. After crossing a six-foot-deep ditch dug to keep the elephant out of the surrounding farm land, we walked the few hundred yards to the lodge, accompanied by an ex-Indian Army colonel, armed with a rifle. There was a strong feral smell in the air.

‘Keep together,' he said. ‘There are elephant about.' The Japanese in the party, who were loaded with a multiplicity of cameras and lenses, had what was surely a dangerous tendency to lag behind and point 500-mm lenses at little flowers. Sure enough, there on the track were four large dollops of what looked like Old Auntie Mary's rich Dundee cake still steaming from the oven, the new-laid droppings of an elephant. Everyone was impressed and one of the Japanese photographed them in colour. The rest of us scuttled after the colonel.

The new Treetops, unlike the old one in which Princess Elizabeth became Queen and which was burned down in the time of the Mau Mau, was not really in a tree at all, although branches writhed unexpectedly in the corridors. It stood on piles above a large pool and salt lick, the edge of which was so trodden by animals that from the upper floors of the lodge it looked like an aerial view of Passchendaele.

Treetops was all right. Had it not been to our liking it would have been just too bad, because we were locked up in it until the next morning.

On the far side of the pool, warthogs and their young were zooming round in circles; a huge, rare, black, giant forest hog was looking at a battered tree as if deciding whether to demolish it or not; and up on the sun deck of the lodge there were baboons, with inflamed faces and even more alarming effects at their other ends, careering about, knocking over loaded Pentaxes, pinching the sandwiches laid out for afternoon tea, and disappearing rudely between ladies' legs. In addition, black-headed orioles in the Cape chestnut trees made fruity noises, and thousands of weaver birds were seething away in a bed of reeds in the middle of the pool. The noise was terrible. We were told to keep quiet so as not to frighten the animals. It seemed a superfluous warning, like telling children at a cocktail party to pipe down.

But there was nothing to the bedlam which broke loose when night fell, and the baboons and their young had departed, and the weaver birds had taken to their swinging nests in the reeds. There had been rain in the bamboo forests high in the Aberdares, and to escape it the animals had come down in force. At any one time throughout the night there were fifty elephant outside the lodge under the floodlights, all taking up trunk-loads of mud packed with health-giving mineral salts; black buffalo wallowed in it so deep that only the huge black handlebars that were their horns showed; rhinos wallowed less deeply – all were the uniform saffron colour of the mud. All species, including the various sorts of buck, observed a wary apartheid. As in the world of men there was a lot of confrontation and a lot of backing down – everything feared the buffalo. Only the rhino really faced up to one another, and when one of them slipped his opponent a length of allegedly aphrodisiac horn, it went lumbering off into the forest, groaning.

It is the noises they all made that I remember: gaseous noises; sounds like heavy furniture which has lost its castors being moved across a room; the sounds of the last water going down the plug hole; even more weird gurglings and the sound you produce when you blow into a funnel.

Treetops was perhaps the one hotel in the world where, if you could only get to sleep, you could share a double room (you had to whether you liked it or not) and snore to your heart's content; but sleep by night was impossible and a waste of valuable viewing time. When the swift African dawn came around six-thirty, the animals were still there, stuck in the mud, and I was hooked on East Africa.

In the depths of the winter of 1969, winter being the best time to visit a great city, particularly Istanbul, and a hundred and thirty years having passed since Miss Julia Pardoe wrote her valedictory paragraphs, we set off to see for ourselves what had been going on in those parts.

We travelled by the Orient Express: ‘we' because it is inconceivable that anyone should spend such a bundle of money to travel in a first-class wagon-lit alone, or for that matter with anyone with whom one was not on terms of the deepest intimacy.

Of all the couple of hundred named Continental expresses it is the Orient which has most kindled the public imagination. Perhaps it is the thought of beautiful women in bed thundering across Europe towards the capital of a tottering empire presided over by the half-mad, pistol-toting Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who had walled himself up in the Yildiz Park which he had constructed by entirely eliminating a large Muslim cemetery.

The inaugural run of the Orient Express took place in October 1883, when it set off from the Gare de L'Est with an extraordinary assortment of persons on board. Among them – a representative of the Sublime Porte; a marvellous but very hairy chef; M.
Nagelmakers, the Belgian founder of the International Wagons-Lits Company; an author and various journalists including
The Times
correspondent; Henri Stefan Opper de Blowitz, ‘under five feet high and more than five feet round the waist', who on his arrival in Constantinople scooped the world with the first recorded interview with Sultan Abdul Hamid II. At Strasbourg they were joined by two superb women, one of them the wife of the Austrian Minister for Railways. The whole party travelled in luxury which is inconceivable today.

Then, as in 1969, the Orient Express did not go to old Stamboul. After Bucharest it stopped on the shores of the Danube at Giugiu where the passengers crossed the river on a ferry to Rustchuk and then went on to Varna on the Black Sea by train in seven hours, from where it was fifteen hours to Constantinople bucketing in a steamer, a total of 81½ hours. This was thirty hours quicker than any previous service. The train had to follow this rather circuitous route because the Bulgarians would not allow it to run through their country. They were still bloody-minded about railways in 1969. Even then there was no restaurant car on any international expresses running through their country.

The Simplon-Orient route to Istanbul by way of Venice and Yugoslavia was opened only in 1919. In 1969, so far as the Orient Express was concerned, Bucharest was the end of the line.

For this reason, in order to make a sentimental pilgrimage on the Orient Express and at the same time get to Istanbul from Paris, it was necessary to change trains and stations at Vienna. Before catching it we spent two very agreeable nights in Paris at the Hôtel Vendôme, in the Place of the same name and with a splendid view of it, hemmed in by Second Empire furniture, and travelling up and down in a lift so small that it was like being in a matchbox lined with red plush – being in the Hôtel was like looking at a Ritz through the wrong end of a telescope, and looking
at the bill through the right end of a burning glass. It cost F77.50 (£5.80 or $13.90) for a double room, but was worth every centime of someone else's money.

The Orient Express left the Gare de L'Est at 22.15. Before boarding it we had a highly ritualistic and excellent, if rather copious, dinner, at the Relais Gastronomique Paris-Est, on the first floor in the station, having broken through a checkpoint where the whole question of whether we should be allowed in at all was carefully deliberated. Just because you happen to be interested in train-spotting does not necessarily qualify you to beggar yourself by dining at the Relais Gastronomique Paris-Est, without previous vetting by the Direction. We got in because we were both wearing the kind of fur-lined great-coats that are mandatory for travelling in the Balkans in winter, and also for residing in Istanbul.

Le Diner

Pâte de Pistache

Langoustes Soufflées

Noisettes D'Agneau Charmereine

Mousse Glacée

Wine: Quart de Chaume and Chinon

Eau-de-Vie

No audible conversation, let alone laughter, allowed and no discount for leaving your Michelin on the table. The management had not read the bit beginning ‘
Entrez
…
votre guide à la main, vous montrerez ainsi qu'il vous conduit en confiance'
, and if I had done so would have sent us to the station buffet.

After this memorable repast, which took hours and which could easily have qualified it at that time to be included in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the most expensive railway restaurant in the
world,
¹
we withdrew our real leather luggage lined with silver-topped crystal bottles and ivory-handled hair-brushes, which Wanda had bought in a sale because they all had the same initials as she had inscribed on them (we were really doing this in style), from the depository, pushed our luggage, there being no porters at this time of night, up the platform of this sad, sad station, with its memories of Verdun and long-dead
poilus
, and boarded the Orient Express. The exercise did us a world of good.

The next day a German dining-car, which seemed to run on velvet, was attached to the train, although the wagon-lits conductor was Austrian. In Vienna we had eight hours in which to buy luxuries in the way of food and drink for the next two days and dine again, an indifferent dinner at Sacher (where I have never dined well, although I always hope to), before catching the Balkan Express from the Sudbahnhof at 22.20. The wagon-lits on this train was a very gruesome affair, no mahogany, no rare inlaid woods or brasswork. They were made of what appeared to be tin that had been painted a sickly shade of blue.

The only good thing about the Balkan Express was the conductor, an archetypal wagons-lits man with a permanent six o'clock shadow and the conspiratorial air of a
valet de chambre
who has someone with uncertain tastes for a master, which wagons-lits conductors often have. He told us hair-raising stories about the route before the war, addressing us in English but calling us Monsieur and Madame. How, in 1929, the train was snowed up for seven days in the highlands of Eastern Thrace, surrounded by wolves and how they burned the furnishings
lit
by
lit
to keep warm (which was not true) and about the prostitutes you could telegraph down the line for and toss off the train in another
country when you had had enough of them, just as long-distance lorry-drivers do now, nearer home (which was).

Zagreb, the following morning, was full of coal-burning locomotives belching smoke and steam and when the train left two members of the Yugoslav Secret Police travelled with it in order to impound the film which I had exposed on these engines. By an elementary piece of sleight-of-hand I was able to hand over an unexposed film and then embarrass them by demanding a receipt. Neither of them could write. Hereabouts, other fragments of trains were attached, of interest only to real train enthusiasts, and our part became the Istanbul Express.

The dining-car was decorated in Balkan Modern – it was as if Pola Negri was about to burst in on us triumphant in furs – but some hidden instrument played gloomy music interminably. The only currency that caused any animation was the Deutschmark. Outside, the weather was bitter and we saw great skeins of geese flying high, boys playing ice-hockey on ponds, using brooms for sticks, and villages whose single street was a frozen mass of mud. Outside Belgrade the train stopped at Topcider which had a station-house like a Habsburg hunting-lodge.

At the Bulgarian frontier the dining-car was taken away and the American diesel engine replaced by a huge steam locomotive, which panted up through the snow and over the Dragoman Pass in the darkness. In our
voiture
we were the only passengers now, ripe for a sticky end. At five the next morning the train crossed into Greece. In Macedonia, big Greek steam engines were standing in the sidings under the arc lights, belching smoke. It was bitterly cold. The place to get a taste of it was in that unclaimed territory over the couplings between the carriages, where the coal burning wagons-lits stoves couldn't reach. This was (and is) wild, dangerous country on the frontier with Turkey. There used to be bandits, now there were watch-towers and minefields and the line was
heavily guarded by soldiers wearing heavy, hooded coats and sub-zero-type boots. Great drifts of snow and icicles hung over it. To the left there were frozen swamps and a big river jammed with ice.

With the sun rising downstream over Thrace we entered Turkey and at seven-thirty reached Edirne, or rather a station near it. There were beggars, many of them children, all along the line in the bitter wind, swathed in rags. We felt ashamed to be travelling in such comfort. Then we crossed into Greece again, and out of it at a place called Pythion, where a dining-car was attached. Nothing to do with the Wagons-Lits Company, it served an awful lunch. It was as if Turkish Railways were trying to destroy us but not quite hard enough to succeed. In the afternoon the train, now with two steam engines in front, passed through Çorlu, near which the Orient Express had been snowed up in 1929, and battled up a series of immense curves through the heavily fortified zone east of Cerkeskoy. Out with the telephoto lens and the notebook!

At 15.15 we arrived in Istanbul, 2053 miles, 63 hours and 38 minutes from the Gare de L'Est, which included eight hours in Vienna; but by the time we had secured our registered baggage from the customs authorities and secured a beat-up American automobile of the Steinberg era masquerading as a taxi, the sun was setting.

‘Pera Palace Hotel,' I told the driver.

Out on Galata Bridge a strong wind was blowing down the Golden Horn, carrying with it the smell of tanneries and worse. The Asma Sultana's
arrhuba
does not stop at the Sweet Waters of Asia any more and there are no Greek maidens to dance the
romaika
on St George's Day; but looming in the twilight, like a cut-out against the western sky, was the fantastic, incomparable sky-line of old Stamboul; the vision, if ever there was one, of a battered paradise.