Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  VIII. ON THE PILGRIM ROAD

  I Darius King of Kings begins the inscription on the great rock carvings at Bisitun. In the dimming afternoon light we could barely see the huge outlines of the figures. The great mountain rises to a peak at either end, each cut off sheer, making, the Kourds say, the silhouette of a house with a broken ridgepole. On the higher cliff, ochre-stained and rusty with lichen, you can make out the gigantic figures of bearded men. Archæologists hung in baskets from the top of the cliff can still read the bragging cuneiform inscription: I Darius King of Kings …

  This road, from Hamadan that may have been Ecbatana to Kermanshah and the pass of Taqi Garra that is a vast stair leading down into Iraq, is one of those roads where have marched all the great parades of history. The rocks are worn and grooved by the shuffling of the feet of countless generations of men and animals. Everywhere people have scribbled on the rocks. A curious awe of history hangs over these valleys and cliffs, these stony riverbeds. In the echoing gorges the shouts of the Elamites and the soldiers of the Great King seem still to rumble in the distance among the cursing of the Tommies and hoofbeats of Russian cavalry.

  In these last years History has revisited these regions in the shape of three devastating armies. The Turks and the Russians fought back and forth here all through the war. In 1918 the British pushed through here in their campaign for oil, building, or rather rebuilding the road as they went. The result is that there is hardly a khan or a village standing, that the desert, heir of the great parades of history, has nibbled away all the arable land, that in a day’s run in a broken-down Ford you can’t find a thing to eat except a bowl of sour milk, if you’re lucky, in the tent of a migrating family of Kourds.

  The road is full of pilgrims from Persia and all the Shiah world, for this is the good time for travelling; the rivers are dry, and there is no snow yet in the passes and it is beginning to be cool in the lowlands of Iraq. I can’t imagine how they eat, particularly the merry and dust-stained families you see going it on foot, because the Armenian and I, for all our jingling of silver, count ourselves lucky if we scrape up one meal a day. These pilgrims are on their way to the Holy Cities of Iraq, Kazimain and Samarra and Nedjef and Kerbela, burial places of imaums, men who cast no shadows, whose souls are God’s body. Rich people on horses and mules, women jolting in camel-litters, poor people on donkeys or on foot, caravans of small white coffins of the dead being taken for reburial in sacred earth. All day we pass them, splashing them where the road is muddy, giving them dust to eat, the Ford hopping and choking along like a dog on three legs, for the Armenian who drives talks English and wears a thinly disguised English officer’s uniform and he feels as his the triumph of the Cross and the Allies over the turban and the Hun.

  One night in the caravanserai of a ruined town I don’t remember the name of, we had a little cell of which we had blocked the door with the car. The Armenian had left me there to guard the stuff and had gone off to scare up some food. I squatted on the low roof, ducking my head to keep from knocking down any of the fragile glittering glass balls the stars that hung down from the intense blueglass ceiling of the sky. The courtyard was full of little fires round which sat motionless figures of pilgrims; their talk was so low you could hear the munching of the mules and horses in the stalls. Occasionally a camel growled. In my face came a smell of dry sticks burning and from the kahwe under the gate a drowsiness of opium. Everything was spun of glass or ice; you hardly dared breathe in the intense fragility of the moment.

  East and west and north and south were intense and bodiless presences like the being you used to imagine behind the windowcurtains when you were a kid. The four directions were torturing points spitting you through like the swords of Our Lady of Pain. Why is going east so different from going west; why is southward happy and northward miserable?

  There was a whiff of singed meat in the air and the Armenian appeared below me with some skewers of kebab in his hand, a fold of bread and a white melon under his arm. We ate and fell fast asleep in our tracks.

  Next morning the courtyard was empty. The pilgrims had all slipped away before light. We swallowed some tea and were off. This was the day we were going to drop four thousand feet over the great pass that leads into the Messpot. I felt itchy and depressed. Names of the cities I hadn’t seen hummed like gnats round my ears: Kaboul, Herat, Khorasan, Isfahan, Shiraz. Baghdad would never make up for them. Besides it had a German sound, smacked of articles in the Nation on the Near East Question, of the Winter Garden. Oh, those pink Arabian nights.

  And the ladies of the harem

  Knew exactly how to wear ’em

  In Oriental Baghdad long ago.

  After all, what was the use of going to a place that had established itself so definitely in Berlin and New York? Baghdad was in the locked-up plans of the German general staff, in Jake and Lee Shubert’s storehouse, in the vaults of the Anglo-Persian. Why go messing round after it on the banks of the Tigris? After all, between the rivers they still showed strangers the wreck of the Garden of Eden and the actual figtree from which Adam and Eve pulled the leaves out of which they fashioned decency, morality and vice. That was something to look forward to.

  Meanwhile the Ford was bowling along. We passed all the pilgrims who had spent the night in the caravanserai. The dry rolling plain was getting uneasy, breaking into gulches. Suddenly the plain began to flow through a gap in the hills. The road was drawn with it and we were going down a broadening, steepening valley. The valley narrowed to a gorge and we were zigzagging down the huge face of a mountain. Below us the hills dropped away in folds like enormous steps into a series of blue streaked horizontals. The Sea?—The Messpot, said the Armenian—Over there, Baghdad.

  At Kasr Shirin everybody seemed to think I was in a great hurry. It was a pleasant pink and white town with porches held up on thin white-daubed columns. I wanted to wait and eat something, to sit around and see the town, but everyone seemed to think I would miss the train if I waited a second, so before I could help myself I was put in a vehicle with three gendarmes with rifles and packed off, as I thought towards Khanikin.

  This vehicle was drawn by two mules and looked a little like the pictures of the ox-drawn beds of the Merovingian kings you used to get on little bon point cards they gave you when you knew your French lesson. It was the shape of a spring wagon—it had no springs—with a top and delicately looped side curtains. The woodwork was painted with pink and blue and purple flowers. In it the officer of gendarmerie and I lay at full length back to back, our heads elegantly resting in the palms of our hands, while the two men at arms squatted at our feet. The driver walked alongside and cursed at the mules.

  So in reluctant and Shebalike splendor I was conveyed out of Kasr Shirin and out of Persia.

  Across a crazy tumbled region of pink and violet and eroded orange hillocks, vermilion badlands, and the great pebbly bed of a river. Not a spear of green anywhere, nothing but this confusion of crumbling mineral color in the clangor of the afternoon sun. The vehicle plunged and lurched in the ruts of the fissured track; pink dust hung about us, and at last, shaken and thirsty and hungry and buffeted, we arrived at the railhead, a jumping-off place of jumping-off places. Yellow barrack sheds surrounded a patch of wheel-tracked dust where a few old men sat selling watermelons; beyond were some more sheds beside a track where stood three uncoupled freight cars. All this was penned off by fence after fence of barbed wire. This was the station and quarantine of the Iraq border.

  The Persian gendarmes carried the hippo and escorted me gravely into the station building and then left me; the vehicle drove off and I was alone with the flies. After hours I found the babu stationmaster. He was pompous and severe. The time was different from Persia, the money was different; this wasn’t Khanikin; there was nowhere to get anything to eat. So I sat on the hippo in the shade outside the station door, trying to eat my watermelon before the flies did, getting stickier and stickier and dustier and dustier, and lonelier and lonelier. Down
the track a vague squatting of “natives,” characterless natives out of Kipling.

  At last a wheezy black locomotive arrived, towing three grey cars with sunshutters, giving out from every crack the smell of steam and machine oil that brought all terminals back to my mind, the old Seventh Street Depot in Washington and the Grand Central and the South Station and the Gare St. Lazare and the Gare d’Orléans and the Gare de Lyon and the Estacion del Mediodia and the Bahnhof in Strasbourg. Oh, the meals eaten in station restaurants and the coffee and drinks at midnight in the little bars across the street! The oyster stew at the Grand Central and langoustes opposite the Gare St. Lazare, the bolted meals at Bobadilla and the chestnuts and churros at the end of the Calle Atocha, the pickled partridges and the snails washed down with manzanilla, all the last meals in all the terminal cities, meals mixed with the smell of steam and the thump hiss, thump-hiss, thumphiss of engines. Candy cigars cigarettes.… Have a nice chicken sandwich, individual brick of pure homemade Horton’s icecream.… Nothing sold after the train leaves.… Oh, even the paper sandwiches and the smell of diapers on the New York, New Haven, & Hartford.

  And all I could do was sit there in the dark amid screaming memories and stuff myself with watermelon, and watch, in the dim light of the single lamp on the station, the pilgrims from Persia who had lost, in crossing the magic line of British dominion, their merriment, their dignity of feature and gesture, the elegance of their rags and their tall felt hats, and had become as they crowded into the sweaty train mere featureless natives out of Kipling.

  At last in great distress in the midriff from overmuch watermelon and alarmed by what a French doctor had told me, Monsieur en Iraq il ne faut pas abuser des pastèques, I curled up in the striped Tabriz blanket and went to sleep.

  I woke up to find an Englishman offering a drink; the train was in Khanikin; he had ridden down from some oil borings somewhere to the north. We sat up drinking in the dim light of the sleeping compartment talking about the Yezedis. All his workmen were Yezedis, devil-worshippers. He was trying to collect data about them, though it was very hard to find out anything very definite about them. The cult centered about a town or a tomb near Mosul, named Sheikh Aadi. They were supposed to be the last fragments of some Manichæan sect. They had a sacred book, but writing and reading were forbidden them. The name of Sheitan was holy and all the s and sh sounds were cut out of their language. They were supposed to have promiscuous love feasts on certain nights like those the Romans liked to ascribe to the early Christians. They always did the lowest possible kind of work, they were roadmenders and scavengers, and, a few of the richest of them, truck-gardeners. They were supposed to believe in the gnostic sevenfold emanation of God, but Sheitan they worshipped as lord of this world in the form of a golden peacock.

  Eventually there was no more whisky and no more watermelon and no more about the Yezedis, and we went to sleep. When I woke up the Englishman had gone. The sun was rising over a vast plain dusty and treeless as a New York backyard that stretched an even battleship grey in every direction, without hills or houses or faintest hope of breakfast.

  IX. BAGHDAD BAHNHOF

  1. Angels on Wheels

  You sit in a garden outside of the American Bar on Tigris bank under some scrawny palms. At the foot of the grey mud bank the Tigris runs almost the color of orangepeel in the evening light. At a fire of palmstalks an Arab with his skirts girded up is frying Saratoga potatoes in a huge pan of boiling grease. As fast as he fries them he hands them out on plates to vague khakied Anglo-Saxons who sit limply drinking Japanese beer and talking about malaria, sandfly fever and dysentery. Round boats of wickerwork and skins (see Xenophon) navigate the swift river, spinning as they go. An occasional long wherry with a lantern in the bow shoots out from under the bridge of boats modelled on the one with which Cæsar crossed the Rhine. In the drinking of a glass of Japanese beer the day flares up yellow like a guttering lamp and goes out, leaving night, the scudding lanterns of the wherries, the arclights on the bridge and the dense Chaldæn sky embossed with stars.

  From far away across the river come the hoot of a locomotive and the banging of shunted freightcars. The Baghdad Railway. The mazout-burning locomotives hoot derisively beyond the mud horizons. Oh, never-to-be-finished Baghdad Bahn that was to have joined the Sultan Shah Mulay Wilhelm Khan Pasha to his Eastern dominions, bogey of queasy-livered colonels in the Indian service, Moloch well fattened with young men’s lives, phantom on lurid wheels that ran mad expresses through the eighteen-nineties up the steep years of the new century, only to smash up once and for all in the great bloody derailment of the War. Even now the apocalyptic vision of flaming wheels linking India with Constantinople, Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Ostend, hovers over our heads like a greedy and avenging angel as we sit in the dark on Tigris bank drinking Japanese beer and eating Saratoga chips made by an Arab over a fire of palmstalks. Above our heads out of the dense sky the old gods of Chaldæa stare with set unblinking eyes at the river and the bridge of boats and the staffcars and the barracks and the littered trainyards and the fences of barbed wire and the trenches and the sodawater factories and the gutted bazaars and the moving-picture theaters and the great straggling stinking camps of refugees.

  —Well, says the fat man from Illinois who is here to buy guts for the sausage factories of Chicago,—may be the Chicago of the Near East some day.… Still it’ll take some booming before I invest in any real estate.…—Dunno, if I had a chance on some lots near the station, said the Armenian from St. Louis.…

  There are no more Saratoga chips. We are tired of Japanese beer. Inside, cocktail time is beginning at the bar. I’m alone in the dark under the scrawny palms. From the distance comes the crazy hooting laughter of locomotives.

  And Ezekiel too by the river Chebar in the midst of the great mudflats saw angels on wheels:

  Their appearance was like burning coals of fire and like the appearance of lamps … and the fire was bright and out of the fire went forth lightning.… The appearance of the wheels and their work was like the color of a beryl, and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.

  As for their rings they were so high that they were dreadful, and their rings were full of eyes about them four.

  And when the living creatures went the wheels went by them.

  2. Waters of Babylon

  The Scotch engineer very kindly stopped the train for Kut to let me off at Babylon. In the grey plain the single track was two long flashes of sun. In every direction were gravelly hillocks of dust and potsherds that you could imagine to be the traces of walls, blocks of building, ziggaruts. This must have been about 125th Street. Jeremiah certainly had the right dope about Babylon:

  And I shall dry up her sea and make her springs dry. And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment and an hissing, without an inhabitant.

  And Isaiah:

  And Babylon the glory of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldees’ excellency shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

  It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there:

  But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there and satyrs shall dance there.

  And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and the dragons in their pleasant places.…

  How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased.

  —Morgen, said the leader of a ragged and dusty group of urchins who started to lead me into the downtown district—Bonjour … Babylon me know.… Bloody no good. The others kept up a chorus of Floos, meester, and danced round me with grimy palms upturned, undoubtedly the satyrs of Isaiah. So we proceeded to scramble over rubbishpiles for hours under the noon sun until at last we came, in the region of Times Square, to the L
ion Gate and foundations of great paved halls that are supposed to be where Balthazar had his famous feast.

  At last, dripping with sweat and with my mouth stopped with dust, I sank down under a palmtree in front of the still backwater that was once the main stream of the Euphrates, wondering at the peculiar effectiveness of the curses that Jeremiah had ordered the “quiet prince” Seraiah to write in a book and tie to a stone and cast into the Euphrates so that the luck of Babylon might sink as the stone sank. Jez I’d like a glass of beer, I muttered half aloud to myself. The urchins, their palms still outstretched, sat in a circle round me—Glas bier, cried the leader of the gang,—subito. And he ran off in the direction of the mud village among the palms.

  A little later he came back with a bottle of Münchner Exportbier, cool and beaded, and some dates tied up in a pink bandana. That was one on Jeremiah all right. And it was no mirage. When I had finished that bottle the urchin said hopefully, Noch einmal, and ran off to fetch another. Revivified by Münchner, the hanging gardens began to shake themselves free of the dust. Bel and Mardruk sat once more in their starry chambers at the tops of their skyscraper temples. The sweet-voiced girls of Ishtar began to sing again among the palms. The song they sang was “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.”