Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

Later as we drove before dawn on the last stage to Teheran, the Sayyid said again:—What is the mistake all the European powers make with regard to Persia? I will tell you. They think only of the great personages. They do not realize that there are little people, like me, doctors, mollahs, small merchants, and that even the peasants talk politik in the teahouses along the roadside. They know they can bribe and threaten the great personages and they think they have the country in the palm of their hands. But they cannot bribe us, the little people, because we are too many. If they buy me over or get me killed there will be hundreds of others who think just like me to take my place. What good will it do them?

  It was just dawn; the sharp upward angle of Damavand, the great mountain that overlooks Teheran, was edged with a brittle band of gold. The wind had a sharpness almost of snowfields about it.

  —And when you go back to your country, said the Sayyid,—do not forget to tell the Americans that there are little people in Asia.

  VII. MOHARRAM

  For Z. C. B.

  1. Darvish

  Outside the gate where the dusty road winds off under the planetrees towards the hills sits an old man dressed in white with a blue turban. His beard is dense as if moulded out of silver. He sits motionless, staring straight ahead of him out of frowning hawkeyes. In one hand he holds up a curved sword, in the other hand resting in his lap he holds a book. The sword or the Koran. The horns of the swelling crescent drawing together on the world. People as they pass leave coppers on the corners of the prayer rug he sits on. The old man sits without moving, regardless of the swirling dust, squats beside the road on a piece of Manchester carpet with the face of an emir leading Islam into holy war.

  In Persia there is a sort of holiness in the very fact of beggary. A beggar is an instrument by which a believer may lay up for himself treasures in heaven. In Mianej at the khan there was a merchant whose caravan had been plundered by bandits. He had a certificate from some mujtahid that Allah had bereft him of worldly goods and was sitting in the upper chamber patiently waiting for travellers to make him presents so that he might eventually start in business again. He had the face of a very happy man, of one who had stopped struggling against adverse currents. Not for nothing does Islam mean submission, self-abandonment.

  And in every teahouse along the road you find merry fellows, ragged and footsore, men of all ages and conditions who have given up working and drift along the highroads, exploiting as best they can the holiness of poverty. They are certainly the happiest people in Persia. They have no worry about tax collectors or raids from the hilltribes or bandits in the passes. They go about starving and singing prayers, parched by the sun and wind, carrying epidemics and the word of God from the Gobi desert to the Euphrates. Tramps exist everywhere, but in what we can vaguely call the East, going on the bum is a religious act. All madness, all restlessness is from God. If a man loses his only child or his loved wife or suffers some other irreparable calamity he strips off his clothes and runs out-of-doors and lets his hair grow long and wanders over the world begging and praising God. A man becomes a dervish as in the Middle Ages in Europe he would have gone into a monastery.

  I used to think deeply of all these things on my way back and forth to the telegraph station during those weeks in Teheran when my bag of silver krans had dwindled to a handful and my hotel bill grew and grew and every cable for money cost a week’s board. It was in the early days of Moharram, the month of mourning, when there is no music or dancing, the month of the passion of Hosein, the son of Fatima, daughter of the Prophet. Every day Teheran was filling more and more with beggars and religion and hatred of foreigners. I used to wonder how it would be to sit under a planetree beside the road telling the story of the Shiah martyrs to a circle of villagers while people brought you tea and a bowl of rice with tears running down their faces at the tales of the sufferings of the great Imaum, son of Ali, whose flesh was infused with the substances of God, done to death by the falseness of the men of Kufa, dogs and sons of dogs, and by the wiles of Sheitan, the stoned one.

  With the name of Allah for all baggage you could travel from the Great Wall of China to the Niger and be fairly sure of food and often of money, if only you were ready to touch your forehead in the dust five times a day, and put away self and the glamorous West.

  And yet the West is conquering. Henry Ford’s gospel of multiple production and interchangeable parts will win hearts that stood firm against Thales and Democritus, against Galileo and Faraday. There is no god strong enough to withstand the Universal Suburb.

  Within our time the dervish, the symbol of mystery errant on the face of the world, will become a simple vagrant as he is in civilized countries.

  2. The Teahouse

  Hot afternoons the E.A. sat in a covered courtyard beside a fountain where goldfish swam, drinking glass after glass of tea and eating a curious cool jelly flavored with roses. There were few people in the teahouse: an occasional Armenian in European clothes, a Turk in fez and frock coat. In the month of mourning people stay in their houses. In a far corner the serving boys talked in low whispers. A fountain tinkled; there was the buzz of an occasional fly. The few sounds were flaws in the bright crystal silence.

  Caught tight in the intent stillness of autumn afternoons, the E.A. used to wonder and puzzle on a continual jerky roundabout of ways and means. At the bottom of a vast still contentedness something miniature kept going round and round: how to get to Isfahan, how to get to Khorasan eastward, eastward to Kabul, to the Afghan mountains, to Canton, to Frisco. He pulled off ring after ring, but never the brass ring that carries the prize.

  But what do I want to drag myself round the Orient for anyway? What do I care about these withered fragments of old orders, these dead religions, these ruins swarming with the maggots of history? Old men, toothless eunuchs asleep in the sun. It’s in the West that life is, terrible, destroying sprouts of the new among the litter of Russian trainyards, out of the smell of burnt gasoline in Detroit garages. To hand Samarcand on a platter to that little Polish girl in the funicular at Tiflis.

  As a sideshow it’s still pretty fine, this vanishing East. The inexpressible soft, lithe swinging length of a two-humped camel’s stride; the old men with crimson beards, the enormous turbans, white, blue, black, green, perched on shaved polls, boys with their hair curling troubadour-fashion from under their skullcaps, the hooded ghosts of women, the high-domed felt hats, the gaudy rags, the robes of parrot-green silk, trees the violent green of manganese spurting out of yellow hills, quick watercourses, white asses, the robin’s-egg domes, the fields of white opium poppies.

  If one were old enough and one’s blood were cool enough there would be the delight of these quiet gardens of poplar-trees, the deferential bringing of the samovar, the subtle half smiles across the rim of tiny glasses of tea, the glint of scurrying water in the runnel in the center of the room, the bright calm of sunny changeless courts, the effortless life of submission to the Written.

  But there are things worth trying first.

  The E.A. gets to his feet dizzy with a sudden choked feeling of inaction and walks out into the broad street where the twilight flutters down like scraps of colored paper through the broad leaves of the planes. Hassan, Hosein. Hassan, Hosein.… To a sound of drums a procession is passing, gruff voices savagely passing, the warlike banners and standards of Islam, the hand of Fatima, the mare’s tails, the crescent. It is the caravan of Hosein, sweet-bearded trusting old man, leaving Medina for Kufa on the last journey. There is no grief yet, but a sense of something circling overhead, wings of doom that plane above the dimming twilight, through the streets the drumbeat and the tramp of feet and the gruff cry of triumph, Hassan, Hosein.

  After all are these gods so dead?

  3. Malaria

  The Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford looked at the thermometer and shook his head. Then he fetched his wife, who looked at the thermometer and shook her head. The room was full of people looking at thermometers and shaking t
heir heads; a voice travelled from an immense distance and said: Nonsense, I feel fine. The bed was strangely soft, billowy, soaring above the heads of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford and his wife and the Hôtel de France and the cries beating out of brass throats, Hosein, Hassan.

  There was a chasm. The City Without Bedbugs stood on the edge of the chasm. Insh’allah, said the Russian engineers, the city will not fall into the chasm, which is a hundred and five degrees deep. Then there arose a great prophet and he said, Ah mon ami, j’ai trouvé un poux. Avec le typhus qu’il a c’est très dangereux. Bismillah, cried the villagers. The city is going to fall into the chasm. Then spake the prophet: The City Without Bedbugs is doomed to slide into the gulf. Bismillah, cried the villagers. We must fill up the gulf or chasm. Whereupon they began throwing in their furniture and their possessions and their houses and their wives and children and lastly themselves. Intra venos, said the Sayyid rolling his eyes and shot in a tumblerful of quinine.

  Then I was lying very long and cold and brittle on the stony tundra of my bed, and the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford was explaining his plans to me in careful French. In a day or two the road would be open to Recht on the Caspian. Riza Khan was at this moment cleaning up the remnants of the Republic of Ghilan. Then we could drive the Ford to Recht, there load it with caviar that can be bought for nothing on the Caspian and drive back to Kasvin, Hamadan, Kermanshah and Baghdad, where the British would pay through the nose and buy by the grain what we had bought by the kilo. The only thing that stood between us and riches was a few hundred pounds capital to buy gasoline with. Now if I spent the sum I would eventually spend on the fare to Baghdad on gasoline and caviar, we would all get to Baghdad for nothing and have a substantial profit when we got there.

  —But do you really own this voiture Ford?—Virtually. It’s as good as mine.

  Outside the wind howled and shrieked about the house. You couldn’t see the courtyard for dust. Dust seeped into the room through every crevice. There was a half an inch coating of fine white dust on my pillow. The ramshackle building of the Hôtel de France shook and rattled as if it were coming down about our ears. At last the din grew so terrific that I couldn’t hear the suave voice of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford.

  There was a ripping crash and a shriek from somewhere in the hotel. The Russian engineer ran out and came back in a jiffy with his wife in his arms. Her hair hung snakily over her face and she was chirruping excitedly in Russian. The end of the roof over their room had blown off. It was a tin roof and waved in the wind with a sound like stage thunder. Surely the whole house would be down before night. I lay in the bed with the sheet over my nose to keep out the dust, and the sheet over my ears to keep out the noise, feeling very long and cold and weak and tired, and slid effortlessly into sleep like a trunk going down a chute.

  4. Baha’i

  The three American women were Baha’i Missionaries, one from New York, one from Chicago and the youngest one perhaps from some small town in the Dakotas. They all had the same eyes, spread, unblinking, with dilated pupils. We sat in a long dark room furnished in European Persian style, looking at each other constrainedly. The eldest women spoke of the persecutions of the followers of Baha’ullah in Persia, since the time of El Bab, the precursor, martyred in Tabriz: how they were not allowed to be buried, and how they could not meet, and how many of them held their faith in secret. She was old with tired grey hair puffed over her forehead and grey unfirm lips and a face full of small tired wrinkles. The Presbyterian missionaries who lived in the big mission at the other end of town would not speak to them because they were not Christians. They do not know that the service of our lord El Baha’ullah includes the service of Christ who was also a great prophet and the emanation of God.

  Another of the women was a doctor. Her face was firm and thin and she was neatly dressed. She spoke of the sufferings of the women, of their flabby ignorance, their wilted lives in the candied gloom of the anderun, the sickness among them and the difficulty with which they had children.

  The youngest one had come recently to Teheran. Her talk was full of miracles. She had come up from the coast in winter. They had told her it was death to attempt such a thing. Death has no power on the servant of everlasting light. She had crossed alone a great snowy pass that even the Kourds didn’t dare pass in winter; when she came to a ford the swollen river would shrink within its banks; bandits had killed all the other travellers on the road but her; at every step she had felt the hand of God bearing her up, keeping her mule from stumbling, turning away the designs of wicked men.

  It was dark when I left them. Outside, a procession was passing, first a few men dressed as Arabs on horses, then travellers on camels gaudily caparisoned, then men with heavy many-branched lamps of brass, then, behind a steel standard like a great flexed sword, weighted down at the tip by a brass tassel, flashing in the lamplight, penitents in fours beating their breasts in unison, tall dark men with bloodshot eyes, beating their breasts in unison to the agonized breathless cry Hosein, Hassan.

  That was the thumping beat I had heard in the distance, that had made me restless sitting in the house listening to the missionaries talk of Baha’i gentleness and tolerance and fraternal love. From my room at the hotel where I sat reading an old and phony French translation of Euripides I could hear it still, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another, shuddering through the dustladen air of the autumn night, the beating of the breasts of the mourners who followed the caravan of Hosein.

  5. Hosein

  Hosein, the son of Fatima and Ali, grandson of the Prophet, left Medina for Kufa, city of the first doctors of Islam, where his father, Ali, Lord of all the World, had been stabbed to death. Yezid was khalif in Syria and was plotting to poison Hosein as he had poisoned his lazy brother Hassan. The people of Kufa had invited him, the only surviving grandson of Mahomet, to be their khalif. On the first day of Moharram the small party of the imaum Hosein was met by Harro, who had been sent from Kufa by the khalif’s officers to announce that Yezid was master of the city and that Hosein’s adherent Muslim had been killed. Hosein was travelling with a few slaves and his sister and his wives and children. One of his wives was a Persian, daughter of the last Sassanid King. Harro, shameful of his errand, went back to Kufa to beg that the imaum be allowed to return to Medina. Hosein’s party travelled on slowly by night, for the weather was excessively hot. Hosein said: Men travel by night and the destinies travel towards them. This I know to be a message of death.

  Arab-fashion they continued parleying back and forth until, the ninth, Hosein’s caravan encamped at Kerbela, a little hillock beside the Euphrates. The army of Amr ben Saar surrounded them, under orders from Yezid to kill the men and bring the women to Damascus. At the last moment Harro and his men came into the camp to die with the holy ones. That night they corded their tents together and made a ditch full of fagots around them so that they could be attacked only from the front. Hosein bitterly regretted that he had brought the children and the women. They had no water.

  In the morning Amr ben Saad attacked. Hosein’s party was hopelessly outnumbered. At midday, tired from fighting, Hosein sat down for a moment beside his tent and took his baby son Abdullah into his lap. An arrow killed the child. Their thirst became unbearable. Ali Afgar and Ali Asgar, Hosein’s two half-grown boys, tried to make a dash to the river to bring back water. They were killed. At last Hosein himself went down to the river. For a while the men of the khalif did not dare attack him, but as he was stooping to drink an arrow struck him in the mouth. Then the khalif’s men rushed him from all sides. Thirty spears went through him and Amr rode his cavalry back and forth over the body until it was mashed into the mud of the river-bank. The head was sent to Damascus.

  And on the last day Allah, about to hurl all mankind into hell, unmoved by the supplications of Mahomet and Isa ben Miriam and Moses and the two hundred and seventy thousand prophets, will remember the sufferings of Hosein, his agony
of mind and the wailing of his women and the death of his sons and his thirst in the tents at Kerbela, and his eyes will fill with tears and whoever has wept for Hosein, whoever has bled for Hosein, whoever has suffered pain for Hosein will be saved, and will enter the gardens, the well-watered gardens where the houris eternally virgin wait under the trees eternally green.

  In Teheran the tenth of Moharram dawns in terror and dismay. All night the streets have been turbulent with torches and chanting and the hollow sound of bare breasts beaten in unison. In the early halflight the streets are full of watercarriers offering cups of water to passersby in memory of the terrible thirst they suffered in the tents at Kerbela. Now Hosein is receiving the first charge of the horsemen of Amr, the first flight of arrows.

  In a big square in the bazaars the crowd is densest. On a roof chairs have been set for the diplomatic corps, Europeans in frock coats and uniforms, in white flannels and Palm Beach suits as if for a garden party, ladies in pastel-colored dresses, all guarded by a small contingent of Riza Khan’s gendarmes. In every direction out of the covered alleys of the bazaars muffled drums and the gruff breathless shout Hassan, Hosein, Hassan, Hosein.

  Officers of the cossacks and gendarmerie walking very slowly are passing with bowed heads, followed by led horses. Occasionally you can see tears running down a tobacco-colored cheek. Harness clinks, standards glisten in the sun, the hand of Fatima, the crescent with the mare’s tail, green banners and orange banners, penitents in black tunics beating their bare breasts fill the square with a strange gruff hollow sound of pain. Then behind the device of huge steel blades weighted down at the tip by brass ornaments come men stripped to loincloths with skewers and daggers stuck into their flesh, spiked ornaments hung from their bare shoulders, men seemingly spitted by lances and arrows, sweating and dusty in the sun. Then after them, two long lines of men and boys in white shrouds belted with chains, each with his left hand holding the belt of the man ahead and with his right hand beating himself on his bare shaven head with the flat of a sword. The line moves forward slowly, swaying, groaning, beating in time. The blood runs down faces and necks and clots with dust on the white shrouds. There’s a smell of blood and agonized sweat. From everywhere comes the gruff continual choking cry, Hosein, Hassan, Hassan, Hosein. The sun directly overhead flashes on the swords, on the swaying blades of the standards, festers in the blackening blood. Hassan, Hosein. Whoever weeps for Hosein, whoever bleeds for Hosein, whoever dies for Hosein.…