Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  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

&n
bsp; 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?

  The Sayyid’s stock seems to be very low in the caravan. Souleiman had a fight with him about something, hit him in the face, so Baghdad Saleh says, climbed on his camel and made off for Baghdad. I shall miss the faint wail of his lute stealing through the bubbling, grumbling sound of camels across the camp at night.

  Eighth Day: There never was invented a leisurelier, more soothing way of travel than this. The swaying of the camel is just enough to tire you out gradually, gently. You beat him just enough to keep your thoughts in a faint doze. You ride first with one person, then with another, looking back at the long trailing caravan like a kite’s tail behind you; parts of it go out of sight in depressions, curve round hills. It’s the way clouds travel, rivers flow. There are no orders given. Everyone knows what to do, as when birds migrate.

  The sky is an immense sphere of clouded glass balanced on the bit of piecrust the earth; today it shines with occasional ruddy flaws of winter sunshine.

  Towards evening, at the hour when your legs ache and your belly yaps like a dog with hunger, we came into a vast shallow valley running north and south. At the other rim of it was a row of long black things like beetles, the tents of the Delaim.

  Ninth Day: Sweet wind and clear sky. A small party of Agail with a dozen or so baggage camels passed us coming from Aleppo. Very much like speaking a ship at sea.

  We sat all day in our tents, O Israel.

  Spent the day roaming about restlessly, trying to talk Arabic with Nuwwaf and reading Molière. There’s some hitch. The fat sheikh from Kubaissa seems rather low. Much talk of a certain sheikh Mohamet Turki of the Kubain wanting an incredible amount of safety money.

  Tenth Day: Still in the same place. Strange people keep filtering into camp, Delaim dressed in white, very large white-skinned men with waxed whiskers and their hair in pleats over their ears. They are friends of the Agail and the caravan is more or less under their protection.

  From the first crack of dawn tremendous tumultuous speechifying went on at the campfire of Jassem er Rawwaf and has kept up all day; people jump to their feet and shout and wave their arms. The fat sheikh seems to be the general mediator. Jassem er Rawwaf is tall with prominent teeth and a beard slightly lopsided like the beard of Moses; he wears two head-cloths that fall amply over his shoulders, one white and one purple, and mostly sits silent directing the making of coffee with little movements of his long hands or strokes a string of amber beads. Once he got angry and leaned forward across the fire and said something slowly and deliberately that made everyone quiet down and nod his head. Later I asked him what the row was about. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders, at the same time rubbing his thumb and forefinger together with a gesture incredibly Semitic, and said gently, Floos, money.

  All the desert seems to be prowling about greedily and appraisingly, waiting to pounce on our bales of Persian tobacco and the tempting herd of young camels.

  Nuwwaf came and sat in my tent and talked a great deal about how the Ingliz were united and used their guns only to shoot strangers, while the Arabs were always squabbling among themselves and were very nice to strangers. At least so I understood. I agreed with him vigorously.

  There’s a great deal of polishing of guns going on.

  Eleventh Day: Last night happened the first great rumpus.

  I’d gone to my tent and closed myself in to read by candlelight when across the camp there began a great deal of shouting. Everybody started tripping over my tent ropes and rushing about. Baghdad Saleh rushed in to get his gun that he’d left there for safe keeping. Fahad appeared tremendously excited and kept shouting something equivalent to Man the boats. I stood in the door of the tent without being able to see anything, as it was very dark, but Fahad insisted I go in again, shaking his head in a most lugubrious manner. Meanwhile the candle had been knocked over, so I sat a minute in the dark on my cot, listening to the growing tumult outside. I had been plentifully nourished with horrors of Baghdad so I began to form pictures like the waxwork at Madam Toussaud’s of Gordon at Khartoum. I thought of lithographs I’d had in my childhood of explorers in pith helmets being transfixed by assegais. The unfortunate death of the Prince Napoleon. Thank God I didn’t have a pith helmet.

  Finding that I was trembling and chilly, I went to the door of the tent again and lit a cigarette. Immediately a man I did not know ran by shouting something. I gave him the cigarette. He went off with it, seeming much encouraged. Then the Sayyid came up bareheaded and shaking and breathless, saying something about a gun. No, I didn’t have a gun, but I gave him my cigarette. By the time I’d given away a handful of cigarettes the shouting had begun to recede in the distance. I kept wondering when the rifles would begin, not knowing how extremely careful with firearms the Arabs are. Then a great many people came and began to explain what had happened, all more or less unintelligibly. Did manage to gather, though, that the fight had started by one of ibn Kubain’s men trying to steal the Sayyid’s rifle. The rifle had been got back but there had been a fight and heads had been broken.

  There were double sentries posted and everybody lay down heroically to sleep.

  This morning we moved north across a thorny slope noisy with larks, to a camping place near a waterhole in front of the tents of the Delaim.

  Went over with the fat sheikh to visit the Delaim. Their tents are very large, open on the lee side, divided in the middle by a curtain that screens off the women’s part. To anyone born in a way of life g
iven over to cult of Things they seem incredibly bare; a few rugs, some saddles and guns and a couple of piles of sheepskins, some cooking-bowls and the black ragged walls of their tents, are all the Delaim have to swaddle themselves in between the naked earth and the inconceivable sky. We squatted on rugs that were spread for us, coffee was brought, and I stared across the plain that stretched away indefinitely southward, where grazed great herds of sheep with men in brown robes walking among them like in illustrations to the Old Testament, while the fat sheikh talked gravely with the people we were the guests of. Then a woman brought a flat wooden dish that had in it a cake of unleavened bread, steaming hot, swimming with melted ewe’s butter. Must be such butter that Jael brought forth in a lordly dish. A boy poured water over our hands from a little copper ewer, and the head of the house broke a piece out of the middle of the dish with a loud Alham’d’ullah. Then we stretched out our right hands and did eat.

  In the afternoon went round and sat at people’s fires and drank coffee and tried to find out how long we were expected to stay in the tents of the Delaim. Everybody said we’d go bukra insh’allah, but they said insh’allah so many times and rolled up their eyes so fearfully as they said it that it seemed pretty sure that the responsibility for leaving tomorrow was being foisted on Allah and that we’d stay where we were.