Orient Express (14 page)

First Day:
Woke up and crawled out of my tent to find everything else struck and everyone bustling and shouting at a tremendous rate. My delull (dromedary) that I'd been introduced to the day before and whose name I had thought to be Malek stood waiting, and her tasselled saddlebags they dragged the ground O! The datepalms in the gardens of Romandi stood kneedeep in mist that was just beginning to sop up gold in premonition of the sun. While I grasped the silver-encrusted pommels of the saddle everybody gathered round anxiously to see if I would fall off when Malek jerked to her feet. The hobble was loosed. Malek gave a grunt and opened herself like a jackknife. My head poked above the mist into the sunlight that stung red in my eyes. Then we turned round and followed the long string of baggage camels down the ruddy trail that led north and west towards Kubaissa, and for the first time I noticed round the shadows of my head and Malek's nodding head and Fahad's head the halo that so excited Cellini.

There's already excitement about safety money. It seems certain Bedawi of Toman are going to attack us if we don't come across with five pounds Turkish per head of cattle. We are being guarded by some fine hardboiled men on ponies, henchmen, if I got the name right, of one Abdul Aziz, head sheikh of the Delaim. From the moment we got out of gunshot of the sarai at Romadi we were on our own. During the afternoon I had lagged behind the main body of the caravan and was brewing tea with the Sayyid Mahomet and Hadji Mahomet, his cook, and a fauneyed brown youngster from Damascus named Saleh, over a fire of wormwood sticks, when there appeared suddenly over a pebbly hill to the west a bunch of men riding their camels hard. They stopped when they saw us and the wind brought us the groaning and gurgling of their beasts as they dismounted. The Sayyid grabbed his gun and began talking big, and the cook hastily packed the tea things, and we all rode hard after the caravan, saddlebags bouncing and rattling, dromedaries slobbering and snorting. Marvellous how not knowing the language takes away all sense of responsibility. I followed the rest without the vaguest idea of who was friend and who foe, calm in the recollection that my watch had gone by airplane mail. Of course it was a false alarm, but it made your blood tingle just the same. Almost as much as the air and the larks that rose singing from under the camels' feet and the uproar and shouting when a rabbit loped off into the thorny underbrush.

Second Day:
We camped in a place called Sheib Mahomedi near a running stream. On the horizon to the north there are smudges of black smoke from the bitumen pits of Kubaissa. This morning I had to dress up in aba and ismak as Jassem made Saleh tell me that the sight of a European hat would make the caravan unpopular—English hat no bloody good. Arab hat good. So I am lying in all the pomp of a new Baghdad aba on a rug in front of my tent under a shining sky streaked like turquoise matrix. Beside my tent the big bales that load Jassem er Rawwaf's camels are piled in a semicircle round a fire about which all the gravest people of the caravan squat and drink coffee. Opposite is the English tent of the Sayyid Mahomet, which is where gilded youth seems to gather. The circle is completed by the bales of the six or seven other outfits that make up the caravan, arranged like Jassem's in a halfmoon to windward of the fire. Besides the Sayyid and myself and the dancing girls on their way to Aleppo there is only a Damascus merchant effete enough to pitch a tent. Everyone else squats on rugs round the fires under the blue. The camels have been driven off to pasture on the dry shrubs of the hills round about the waterhole and stand dark in curious attitudes against the skyline. Occasionally you catch sight of a guard with his gun aslant his back, motionless, watching from the top of one of the tawny and steely violet hills that break away in every direction like a confusion of seawaves.

Down by the waterhole where I had been bathing I had a long talk in seven words and considerable pantomime with one of the Sayyid Mahomet's retainers, a tall chap with very slender feet and hands, named Souleiman. He was asking about an Englishman named “Hilleby” with whose outfit he had been cameldriver in the Nejd. Hearing that I knew about “Hilleby” excited him enormously. He too dressed like an Arab and liked the sweet air of the desert—Air of desert sweet like honey. Baghdad air filth. Souleiman plucked a sprig of an aromatic plant and made me smell it, some sort of rosemary perhaps it was—Desert like that, he said; then he screwed up his face in a spasm of disgust—Ingliz Baghdad like that. “Hilleby” friend of Arab, not afraid of the desert, good. Then he took me by the hand and led me to the Sayyid's tent and sat me down in the seat of honor and brought me coffee and dates. After sitting there a long time trying to pick up a word here and there in the talk that seemed to be about the Nejd and how smoking was forbidden there and how great and goodly a person was ibn Saoud whom even the English called Sultan, Fahad my cameldriver appeared to tell me that my supper was ready. From him and Baghdad Saleh I got the impression that I was thought by the people of Jassem's outfit to be frequenting low company in sitting so much in the tent of the Sayyid Mahomet. Saleh said as much when he drove the camels home at sunset:—Sayyid he bloody no good. Social life in the desert seems to be as complicated as it is everywhere else.

So I sat alone in my tent eating rice and canned sausage, kosher sausage at that. I peered out through the half-closed flap—Fahad always had the idea I ought to eat in secret and used to shut me up carefully every time he went out—and tried to size up the other outfits in the caravan. Round Jassem er Rawwaf's campfire were my tent and the tent of the dancing girls, from which came a faint wailing of babies, and the little campfires of people with only a few camels who seemed to have attached themselves to Jassem's outfit. Then opposite was the Sayyid's khaki tent and the big tent of the merchant from Damascus and the two wattled litters in which squatted without ever moving a little Turkish merchant and his wife. At one end of the oval was the big encampment of the people who are driving the young camels over to sell in Syria, and at the other the outfit made remarkable by the presence of a fine old gentleman with a green turban and a beard like snow and a dark blue umbrella.

Blue smokespirals uncoil crisply from the campfires through the amethyst twilight. Camels stroll towards the camp in a densening herd, sniffing the air and nibbling at an occasional cluster of twigs, urged on by the long labial cry of the driver. The mollah is chanting the evening prayer. The men stand with bare feet in a long rank facing the southwest, make the prostrations slowly, out of unison. Gradually the camels fill the great oval place between the campfires, are hobbled and fold themselves up in rows, chewing and groaning. The stars impinge sharply like flaws in the luminous crystal-dark sky. My blankets smell of camel and are smoky from the fire. Once asleep, I am awakened by two shots that ring on the night like on a bell. There's a sound of voices and pebbles scuttling under naked feet. Saleh sticks his head in the tent and says proudly,—Haremi, bang, bang, imshi, go away. And I'm asleep again rocked like by waves by the soft fuzzy grumbling noise of five hundred camels.

Third Day:
After a couple of hours' riding we saw palms in a shallow ravine and came upon the little desert port of Kubaissa huddled into its mudwalls among rocky ledges and sandhills. Was taken to see the Mudir and wasted most of the day in mamnouning, coffee, and civilities. In front of the city gate children were playing with a tame gazelle. Was carried off to his house by a fine fat sheikh and fed a wonderful meal of eggs and rice and fried dates and chicken. The fat sheikh is coming with us to terrify the bedawi by the augustness of his presence—All friends, he says, slapping himself on the chest. Was made to taste nine or ten different kinds of dates and not allowed to go to the bazaar, all sorts of attendants being sent to buy things I wanted instead. All this high society is rather trying. Eventually escaped with a book up a long rocky gulch to a deep basin in the hills full of mineral springs that steamed and bubbled out of potholes in yellow rocks. A very Sinai sort of a place. Jehovah used to come here in the old days.

Fourth Day:
Great complication of social events. The Mudir came out to call on Jassem and the Americai, but was lured to the tent of the Sayyid Mahomet, who's a great little social climber, instead. Excitement and dark looks. Then apologies. Visit made all over again, interminable mamnouning. I squatted and grinned and nodded like a damned porcelain figure. Still the Sayyid carried off his infamy in fine style, spreading rugs and abas on the ground and then strewing on them with a grandiloquent gesture a basket of dates and a bag of Turkish paste that the Mudir distributed to his attendants and to the maimed and halt and blind who crowded round. A great day for the Sayyid. Bukra insh'allah, we are off.

Fifth Day:
Malek has bushy eyelashes and eyebrows she can wiggle. Extraordinary how dainty camels are about their food. Some luscious-looking dry shrubs she won't touch and there are occasionally little rosettes with thistly leaves that make her eyes pop out of her head with greediness, that no amount of beating will drive her past.

Off first thing in the morning with considerable pomp, with the sun right in our backs and our shadows incredibly long, topped by crowns of bright rays. Rode with the fat sheikh, who kept producing legs of chicken out of his saddlebags. This is the order of our going: the outfits each start separately, with Jassem's usually first, and gradually fall into line along the trail; then as they get the sleep jounced out of them and the sun thaws their dromedaries the grandees of the caravan ride ahead. A couple of the Agail can usually be seen scouting far off among rocky hillocks on the horizon. At lunch the grandees squat about saucepans of rice and drink coffee and the caravan gets ahead and is caught up to during the afternoon.

This evening we're camping in a flat basin full of low aromatic plants, shiah and ruetha. Ruetha, that's probably the aromatic stuff Xenophon's always talking about in the Anabasis, seems to delight the camels beyond anything. Water must stand here in the rainy season. That rainy season, incidentally, must be about on us, for great showers are piling up to northward to everybody's delight, as they say a day's rain will mean plenty of food for camels. Also it keeps the Bedawi in their tents.

Sat in the tent of the Sayyid, in spite of Baghdad Saleh's remonstrances,—Sayyid he bloody loosewiler, whatever that meant,—and drank tea clogged with condensed milk I'd given the Sayyid in a moment of expansiveness, and listened to Souleiman, the man who went to the Nejd with “Hilleby,” play wailingly on a tiny little lute.

Trebizond

Sixth Day: Enteuthen exelaunei
a good bunch of parasangs with a general feeling of climbing up on a plateau. The trail, made up of many little paths padded soft by the feet of centuries of camels, wound around pinkish ledges here and there dotted with dry plants. In one place we passed the traditional skeletons. In a bottom we found the tracks of a Ford, the tracks of Leachman's car, they said. Leachman was shot during the revolt by the son of an old man he'd insulted. A delicious camping place at length at the edge of a basin where the dry shiah was tall as your waist. Three big rabbits broke cover as we were folding up our camels and everybody shouted and shot off guns in a most cheerful manner.

In the afternoon passed a small square stone tower.

Walked abroad after supper at the hour when they were bringing home the camels. A Bedawi whom I'd seen before riding on a white dromedary came up to me and said he was a friend of Malik Feisul's. We walked out into the desert together, he sniffing the air and saying that the air of the desert was sweet. His name was Nuwwaf. His tents were in El Garrá halfway over to Damascus. I taught him to say north, south, east and west, and he pronounced the words perfectly at once; while my pronunciation of the Arabic equivalents was so comical that he laughed until the tears filled his kohl-pencilled eyes. He took me to have coffee with the people who are bringing over the herd of young camels to sell in Syria. The Hadji, the old gentleman with the umbrella, was sitting at their campfire holding forth about something.

Back in my tent I found Baghdad Saleh and Jassem's little boy rolling me cigarettes. They tried to explain some terrible fate that had almost swooped down on the camels, but I couldn't gather anything definite except that it had been averted by Baghdad Saleh's single-handed prowess. It's very difficult to discover what Saleh means when he tries to speak English because, having worked in the Anglo-Indian camp in Baghdad, he has the deplorable notion that Hindustani and English are the same language.

It's the finest thing in the world to have no watch and no money and to feel no responsibility for events. Like being a dervish or a very small child.

Seventh Day:
The mail plane passed overhead, flying high. Everybody looked at it scornfully without comment. Goddam cold and rainsqualls lashing in our faces. Everything more or less wet. Never have seen such exquisite distaste expressed by any animal as by Malek in the rain. Insh'allah the wind will go down with the sun. Sitting in chilly splendor in my gold-embroidered aba in my hearts and diamonds tent that lets in the wind most damnably for all its crimson lining. But who ever shivered in a broader wind?