Orient Express (21 page)
Authors: John Dos Passos
After dinner of ta'am with sweet milk poured on it and eggs we drank tea and sat long by the little light of two pigeon lamps talking. Eventually they forgot me and I leaned back against the wall, letting the great waves of Arabic eddy over my head. In pauses in the conversation you could hear no sound. The six or eight men who lived in the oasis were all in the room. Probably their wives were listening through chinks in the wall. Outside of the little patch of habitable houses were the broken houses of the old ksar, the tall datepalms and the immensity of sun-licked rock where only the demon Dariuss kept watch.
A great listless quiet was in men's faces, the energy of their words was mere ripples in quiet. In everything they sought the quiet that was the peace of Allah the merciful, the compassionate. It was what Achmed and his friend the tailor said in Marrakesh while Achmed was chopping the fresh hemp for the pipe of kifâIn America we drink stimulants to make us excited, I had saidâHere you smoke kif to make you feel peaceful. He couldn't make out what I meant. Excited was what he had been when the mule had run away and he had ran after it and lost his slippers, a miserable feeling worse than sickness. I tried to explain Coney Island, people paying money to be shaken up, jostled, ruffled, to slide down chutes, to roll in barrels, to jiggle on broken-back bridges. Achmed decided we must be mad in the western lands, but there must be a baraka in our madness because we were very rich. He handed a pipe to the little tailor, who took it reverently, smoked it between sips of tea and sat quiet looking out through the tall door at the sky, a drowsy smile at the corners of his mouth. Then Achmed inhaled deep and sat looking at nothing with a blue glaze over his eyes. He handed the pipe to me. The Westerner, the eater of alphabet soup, drew in the pungent smoke perfunctorily. Was there enough kif in the world to drown the breathless desires, the feeling of headline events round the next corner, the terrible eagerness of railroad stations at dusk, the twilight madness of cities, the wheels, the grinding cogs, the sheets of print endlessly unrolling? For Achmed none of these things existed. Life lay in quiet submission, life's fulfilment was life's brother death.
That night at Findi in the little guestroom of the Caïd's house, sitting back listening to the longdrawn quiet talk, I thought of those things, and of graven images and alphabet soup and the torture of the four directions and the squirrel-cage of the meridians, and of the train of the Trans-Siberian eternally about to leave, the engine whistling on the new train, shiny, smelling like new toys and rubberballs, that never left its shed at the Exposition Universelle. Who will find a name for our madness that has taken the place of glory and religion and knowledge and love, contagion subtler and more lasting and more full of consequences even than the pox Columbus brought back from the New World? Is it worth the drowsiness of kif and a man alone in the sheer desert shouting the triumphant affirmation:
There is no God but very God; Mahomet is the prophet of God?
XIV. MAIL PLANE
In the lee of the tin shed squat an old man and two women muffled to the eyes in tallow-colored rags. A mechanic kneading a piece of waste between his hands is kidding them about pork in a gentle drawl of French mixed with pidgin Arabic. Everybody shivers in the huge flow of cold east wind. At last the plane comes skimming the roll of the bare Moroccan hills. The women giggle behind their veils. In the name of God, says the old man and looks impassively at the passenger and the bags of mail and at the propeller blades that jerk round more slowly and more slowly, become two and stop. The passenger climbs in and huddles facing a thinfaced melancholy man with goggles; they drop in the mail, then the engine roars, the tin shed runs away, the hills waltz slowly, and white Tangier and the Straits and the Atlantic and the black cloud-dribbling mountains of the Riff spin gradually away, dropping in a lopsided spiral. The plane bounces like a ball across a snowy floor of white clouds. You're very cold and a little sick and the hours trundle by endlessly until all at once you are being sucked into a vortex of flying mist and sunny red plowed land and yellow and white houses, you circle the bull ring and it's Malaga. No time for lunch.
At Alicante the passenger sits drinking Fundador with the pilot in a kind of cabaret. On the stage stout ladies out of the past stamp tiredly to castagnettes, but at the table Mercedes (1926 model) slips into an empty chair. Her little black head is shingled, she makes goldy-round eyes like a cat at the talk of speed and cold airpockets.
In the hangover at dawn with hot eyes and dry tongues they start off again, grinding into the north wind.
Valencia through rifts in a snowstorm; then hours of bronze-green sea and rusty coasthills and a double corkscrew into Barcelona. No time for lunch.
North of the Pyrenees the air is thick like white soup. Over Cette the clouds are spouting in gigantic plumes. Trundle and swoop and sudden sideways skidding in the blinding whirl of a storm. It's terribly cold. The earth is dissolved in swirling mist. No more restaurants, steam-heated seats in trains, election parades, red fire, beefsteaks. Nothing but the speed of whirling cold over an imaginary sphere marked with continents, canals, roadribbons, real estate lots. An earth weird as Mars, dead cold as the moon, distant as Uranus, where speed snaps at last like a rubber band. Huddled in a knot, hard and cold, pitched like a baseball round the world.⦠Until you meet yourself coming back and are very sick into your old black hat.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1922, 1927 by John Dos Passos
Cover illustration by John Dos Passos
Cover design by Kat JK Lee
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1145-7
Distributed in 2015 by Open Road Distribution
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
