Orient Express

by John Dos Passos

  Heraclitus who watched rivers,

  parian-browed tancheek travellers,

  who sat late in wineshops to listen,

  rose early to sniff the wind off harbors

  and see the dawn kindle the desert places,

  and went peering and tasting

  through seas and wastes and cities,

  held up to the level of their grey cool eyes

  firm in untrembling fingers

  the slippery souls of men and of gods.

  The candle has guttered out in darkness and wind.

  The tent holds firm against the buffeting wind,

  pegged tight, weighted with stones.

  My sleep is blown up with dreams

  about to wrench loose and soar

  above wormwood-carpeted canyons

  and flinty sawtooth hills,

  up into the driven night

  and the howling clouds.

  Perhaps when the light clangs

  brass and scarlet cymbals in the east

  with drone and jangle of great bells,

  loping white across the flint-strewn hills,

  will come the seeking tentless caravans

  that Bilkis leads untired,

  nodding in her robes

  on a roaring dromedary.

  2. Képis, two caps, a felt hat and a derby, headless on the rack; a muffler dangles, an umbrella. My hat among them. The doors swing.…

  Table, two rows of green white jowls (comme on s’ennuie) munching razorscraped jaws face the catsup bottles, pickle-pots; collars constrict the veins on flabby necks; knives and forks tinkle with little zigzag acetylene glints (dans ce sale pays). Eyes in sideglances (comme on s’ennuie) purse minds in tight (dans ce sale pays) like clasps on the mouths of pocketbooks.

  Baghdad: The Bazaars that Burned

  My shoes creak as fed I make discreetly for the swinging door.

  And yesterday

  I rode a grey stallion

  into the first olive garden

  and day before yesterday

  squatted in the full wind

  I ate dates fried in ghee

  at the right hand of Jassem er Rawwaf

  in the red cave of firelight,

  and watched Hassoon staunch the blood

  from his cut foot in hot embers

  and leaned my head back on the bale

  of stringy yellow Persian tobacco

  eyes gashed by the sharpscented smoke

  legs pricked by the sharp desert flints,

  and listened to Saleh

  teach his frail thirsty song

  of parched Hosein and Kerbela

  to slenderwaisted Ali

  whose walk when calling and calling

  he led back to camp the fortytwo camels

  was a procession of kings returning darkly

  carved on a mountain

  in triumph,

  and wondered

  watching the barbed flames of wormwood

  why Nuwwaf rode off that day

  on his great whitebearded dromedary

  without eating bread

  curlybearded Nuwwaf,

  wind lover, cunning in the four directions,

  who when he laughed brandished steel

  out of kholblackened eyes.

  Esch Scham

  XII. HOMER OF THE TRANS-SIBERIAN

  At the Paris exposition of 1900—but perhaps this is all a dream, perhaps I heard someone tell about it; no, it must have happened—somewhere between the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero there was a long shed. In that shed was a brand-new train of the Trans-Siberian, engine, tender, baggage coach, sleeping-cars, restaurant-car. The shed was dark like a station. You walked up wooden steps into the huge dark varnished car. It was terrible. The train was going to start. As you followed the swish of dresses along the corridor the new smell gave you gooseflesh. The train smelled of fresh rubber, of just-bought toys, of something varnished and whirring and oily. The little beds were made up, there were mirrors, glittering washbasins, a bathtub. The engine whistled. No, don’t be afraid; look out of the window. We were moving. No, outside a picture was moving, houses slipping by, bluish-greenish hills. The Urals. Somebody says names in my ear. Lake Baikal. Irkutsk. Siberia. Yangtse, Mongolia, pagodas, Pekin. Rivers twisting into the bluish-greenish hills and the close electric smell of something varnished and whirring and oily moving hugely, people in boats, junks, Yellow Sea, pagodas, Pekin.

  And the elevator boy said the trains in the Metro never stopped; you jumped on and off while they were going, and they showed magic lantern slides and cinematograph pictures in the Grande Roue and at the top of the Eiffel Tower … but that must have been years later because I was afraid to go up.

  I’ve often wondered about the others who had tickets taken for them on that immovable train of the Trans-Siberian in the first year of the century, whose childhood was full of Twenty Thousand Leagues and Jules Verne’s sportsmen and globetrottairs (if only the ice holds on Lake Baikal) and Chinese Gordon stuttering his last words over the telegraph at Khartoum, and Carlotta come back mad from Mexico setting fire to a palace at Terveuren full of Congolese curiosities, fetishes of human hair, ithyphallic idols with shells for teeth and arms akimbo, specimens of crude rubber in jars; and those magnates in panama hats shunted slowly in private cars, reeking with mint and old Bourbon down new lines across the Rio Grande, shooting jackasses, prairie dogs and an occasional greaser from the rear platform, and the Twentieth Century and Harvey lunchrooms and Buffalo Bill and the Indians holding up the stage and ocean greyhounds racing to Bishop’s Rock and pictures of the world’s leading locomotives on cigarette cards. O Thos. Cook and Son, here’s grist for your mill. Uniformed employees meet all the leading trains. Now that Peary and Amundsen have sealed the world at the top and the bottom and there’s an American bar in Baghdad and the Grand Lama of Thibet listens in on Paul Whiteman ragging the Blue Danube and the caterpillar Citroëns chug up and down the dusty streets of Timbuctoo, there’s no place for the Rover Boys but the Statler hotels and the Dollar Line (sleep every night in your own brass bed) round the world cruises.

  That stationary Trans-Siberian where the panorama unrolled Asia every hour was the last vestige of the Homeric age of railroading. Now’s the time for the hymns and the catalogues of the ships. The railsplitting and the hacking and hewing, the great odysseys are over. The legendary names that stirred our childhood with their shadow and rumble are only stations in small print on a timetable. And still.… Or is it just the myth humming in our drowsy backward-turned brains?

  Does anything ever come of this constant dragging of a ruptured suitcase from dock to railway station and railway station to dock? All the sages say it’s nonsense. In the countries of Islam they know you’re mad.

  In the countries of Islam they know you’re mad, but they have a wistful respect for madness. Only today I was fed lunch, beef stewed in olives and sour oranges, couscous and cakes, seven glasses of tea and a pipe of kif, by the extremely ugly man with a cast in his eye and a face like a snapping turtle who hangs round the souks buying up fox skins, in the company of his friend the tailor, a merry and philosophic individual like a tailor in the Arabian Nights, all because I’d been to Baghdad, the burial place of our lord Sidi Abd el Kadr el Djilani (here you kiss your hand and murmur something about peace and God’s blessing) and they feel that even a kaffir passing by the tomb may have brought away a faint whiff of the marabout’s holiness. So a pilgrim has a certain importance in their eyes.

  They may be right, but most likely this craze for transportation, steamboats, trains, motorbuses, mules, camels, is only a vicious and intricate form of kif, a bad habit contracted in infancy, fit only to delight a psychoanalyst cataloguing manias. Like all drugs, you have to constantly increase the dose. One soothing thought; while our bodies are tortured in what Blaise Cendrars calls the squirrelcage of the meridians, maybe our souls sit quiet in that immovable train, in the darkvarnished newsmelling Trans-Siberian watchi
ng the panorama of rivers and seas and mountains endlessly unroll.

  Now’s the time for the Homeric hymns of the railroads. Blaise Cendrars has written some of them already in salty French sonorous and direct as the rattle of the great express trains. Carl Sandburg has written one or two. I’m going to try to string along some inadequately translated fragments of Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jeanne de France. It fits somehow in this hotel room with its varnished pine furniture and its blue slopjar and its faded dusteaten windowcurtains. Under the balcony are some trees I don’t know the name of, the empty tracks of the narrow gauge, a road churned by motortrucks. It’s raining. A toad is shrilling in the bushes. As the old earth-shaking engines are scrapped one by one, the mythmakers are at work. Eventually they will be all ranged like Homer’s rambling gods in the rosy light of an orderly Olympus. Here’s the hymn of the Trans-Siberian:

  In those days I was still a youngster

  Only sixteen and already I couldn’t remember my childhood

  I was sixteen thousand leagues away from my birthplace

  I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroadstations

  And the seven railroadstations and the thousand and three belfries were not enough for me

  For my youth was then so flaming and so mad

  That my heart sometimes burned like the temple of Ephesus, and sometimes like the Red Square at Moscow

  At sunset.

  And my eyes lit up the ancient ways.

  And I was already such a bad poet

  That I never knew how to get to the last word.

  I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon

  Played hookey in railwaystations in front of the trains that were going to leave

  Now, all the trains have had to speed to keep up with me

  Bale-Timbuctoo

  I’ve played the races too at Auteuil and Longchamp

  Paris-New York

  Now, I’ve made all the trains run the whole length of my life

  Madrid-Stockholm

  And I’ve lost all my bets

  And there’s only Patagonia, Patagonia left for my enormous gloom, Patagonia and a trip in the South Seas.

  I’m travelling

  I’ve always been travelling

  I’m travelling with little Jeanne of France

  The train makes a perilous leap and lands on all its wheels

  The train lands on its wheels

  The train always lands on all its wheels.

  “Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?”

  We are far, Jeanne, seven days on the rails

  We are far from Montmartre, from the Butte that raised you, from the Sacred Heart you huddled against

  Paris has vanished and its enormous flare in the sky

  There’s nothing left but continual cinders

  Falling rain

  Swelling clouds

  And Siberia spinning

  The rise of heavy banks of snow

  The crazy sleighbells shivering like a last lust in the blue air

  The train throbbing to the heart of lead horizons

  And your giggling grief …

  “Say Blaise are we very far from Montmartre?”

  The worries

  Forget the worries

  All the cracked stations katicornered to the right of way

  The telegraph wires they hang by

  The grimace of the poles that wave their arms and strangle them

  The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion tortured by a sadic hand

  In the rips in the sky insane locomotives

  Take flight

  In the gaps

  Whirling wheels mouths voices

  And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels …

  And so he goes on piling up memories of torn hurtling metal, of trains of sixty locomotives at full steam disappearing in the direction of Port Arthur, of hospitals and who es and jewelry merchants, memories of the first great exploit of the Twentieth Century seen through sooty panes, beaten into his brain by the uneven rumble of the broad-gauge Trans-Siberian. Crows in the sky, bodies of men in heaps along the tracks, burning hospitals, an embroidery unforeseen in that stately panorama unfolding rivers and lakes and mountains in the greenish dusk of the shed at the Exposition Universelle.

  Then there’s Le Panama ou Les Aventures de mes Septs Oncles, seven runaway uncles, dedicated to the last Frenchman in Panama, the barkeep at Matachine, the deathplace of Chinamen, where the liveoaks have grown up among the abandoned locomotives, where every vestige of the de Lesseps attempt is rotten and rusted and overgrown with lianas except a huge anchor in the middle of the forest stamped with the arms of Louis XV.

  It’s about this time too that I read the history of the earthquake at Lisbon

  But I think

  The Panama panic is of a more universal importance

  Because it turned my childhood topsyturvy.

  I had a fine picturebook

  And I was seeing for the first time

  The whale

  The big cloud

  The walrus

  The Sun

  The great walrus

  The bear the lion the chimpanzee the rattlesnake and the fly

  The fly

  The terrible fly

  “Mother, the flies, the flies and the trunks of trees!”

  “Go to sleep, child, go to sleep.”

  Ahasuerus is an idiot

  It’s the Panama panic that made me a poet!

  Amazing

  All those of my generation are like that

  Youngsters

  Victims of strange ricochets

  We don’t play any more with the furniture

  We don’t play any more with antiques

  We’re always and everywhere breaking crockery

  We ship

  Go whaling

  Kill walrus

  We’re always afraid of the tsetse fly

  Because we’re not very fond of sleep.…

  Fantastic uncles they are; one of them was a butcher in Galveston, lost in the cyclone of ’95; another washed gold in the Klondike; another one turned Buddhist and was arrested trying to blow up the Britishers in Bombay; the fourth was the valet of a general in the Boer War; the fifth was a cordon bleu in palace hotels; number six disappeared in Patagonia with a lot of electromagnetic instruments of precision; no one ever knew what happened to the seventh uncle.

  It was uncle number two who wrote verse modelled on de Musset and read in San Francisco the history of General Sutter, the man who conquered California for the United States and was ruined by the discovery of gold on his plantation. This uncle married the woman who made the best bread in a thousand square kilometers and was found one day with a rifle bullet through his head. Aunty disappeared. Aunty married again. Aunty is now the wife of a rich jam-manufacturer.

  And Blaise Cendrars has since written the history of General Johann August Sutter, L’Or, a narrative that traces the swiftest leanest parabola of anything I’ve ever read, a narrative that cuts like a knife through the washy rubbish of most French writing of the present time, with its lemon-colored gloves and its rosewater and its holy water and its policier-gentleman cosmopolitan affectation. It’s probably because he really is, what the Quai d’Orsay school pretend to be, an international vagabond, that Cendrars has managed to capture the grandiose rhythms of America of seventy-five years ago, the myths of which our generation is just beginning to create. (As if anyone ever really was anything; he’s a good writer, leave it at that.) In L’Or he’s packed the tragic and turbulent absurdity of ’49 into a skyrocket. It’s over so soon you have to read it again for fear you have missed something.

  But the seven uncles. Here’s some more of the hymn to transportation that runs through all his work, crystallizing the torture and delight of a train-mad, steamship-mad, plane-mad generation.

  I’m thirsty

  Damn it

  Go
ddam it to hell

  I want to read the Feuille d’Avis of Neufchâtel or the Pamplona Courrier,

  In the middle of the Atlantic you’re no more at home than in an editorial office

  I go round and round inside the meridians like a squirrel in a squirrel cage

  Wait there’s a Russian looks like he might be worth talking to

  Where to go

  He doesn’t know either where to deposit his baggage

  At Leopoldville or at the Sedjerah near Nazareth, with Mr. Junod or at the house of my old friend Perl

  In the Congo in Bessarabia on Samoa

  I know all the timetables

  All the trains and their connections

  The time they arrive the time they leave

  All the liners all the fares all the taxes

  It’s all the same to me

  Live by grafting

  I’m on my way back from America on board the Volturno, for thirtyfive francs from New York to Rotterdam

  Blaise Cendrars seems to have rather specialised in America, in the U. S. preferring the happier Southern and Western sections to the Bible-worn hills of New England. Here’s a poem about the Mississippi, for which Old Kentucky must have supplied the profusion of alligators, that still is an honorable addition to that superb set of old prints of sternwheel steamboats racing with a nigger on the safety valve.

  At this place the stream is a wide lake

  Rolling yellow muddy waters between marshy banks

  Waterplants merging into acres of cotton

  Here and there appear towns and villages carpeting the bottom of some little bay with their factories with their tall black chimneys with their long wharves jutting out their long wharves on piles jutting out very far into the water

  Staggering heat

  The bell on board rings for lunch

  The passengers are rigged up in checked suits howling cravats vests loud as the incendiary cocktails and the corrosive sauces

  We begin to see alligators

  Young ones alert and frisky

  Big fellows drifting with greenish moss an their backs

  Luxuriant vegetation announces the approach of the tropical zone

  Bamboos giant palms tuliptrees laurel cedars

  The river itself has doubled in width

  It is sown with floating islands from which at the approach of the boat waterbirds start up in flocks;