A Traveller's Life (26 page)

8.15 a.m. Breakfast. It is a beautiful day, the sun casts golden bars across Broadway which now resembles the chariot race scene in
Ben Hur
.

8.30 a.m. At West 53rd they have the National Pocket Billiards Championship, and next Sunday's Sermon at the Congregational Church at West 56th is ‘The Banquet of Life' by the Reverend Dr Elfron Rees, by which time I shall be eating at home, all being well. People are streaming east to the business section across these golden intersections. Smart and sometimes beautiful girls are showing now in all shapes, colours and sizes, some of them as tall as skyscrapers in their simulated Male Mink Extra Giant Size Hats. A big cigar butt smoulders on the pavement, and this year's cars in showrooms make last year's models look like stone-age transportation.

9 a.m. Columbus Circle. Central Park South looks like a golden river, which is not surprising when you consider the rents. Westwards huge blocks are under construction, the high girders swarming with Red Indians who prefer this dizzy work to being down on the reservation. Blind people are tapping their way to the Jewish Guild for the Blind at No. 1880.

9.15 a.m. At 62nd Street make use of splendid (free) lavatory arrangements at the fourteen-acre Lincoln Centre, and see hanging bronze by Lippold composed of one hundred and ninety separate pieces, as well as Seymour Lipton's
Archangel
, which looks like a space vehicle which is, after all, what an Archangel really is.

March on. Blocks of apartments reach down towards Riverside Park and the Hudson, equipped with little awnings over the pavement and the doormen. North of 70th Street shoulders become squarer, hats more like pimples. Old Central European men doze on benches in the sun on tired little islands of grass, and Gitlitz at No. 2183 sells
wursts
as big as 75-mm shells. Here the buildings are neither high nor low, and they are built of sad-looking brick so that they seem to be in permanent mourning. The sidewalks are dustier, the shops are dingier, and drug stores begin to advertise ‘Roach killer'. ‘Did you know,' says a notice in a bookshop, ‘that
our West Side neighbourhood contains the country's greatest collection of works and artists,' and proceeds to back this statement up by an impressive display of books, all by local writers. On the corner the
National Enquirer
announces the latest news ‘Behind Grace Kelly's Bedroom Door.' Kosher butcher announces that there is two days' Succoth, which is why there are so few people about. Some graffiti here: ‘Don't blay with Blomberg,' one warns. ‘Don't mes with Alpert,' says another, equally definitely.

10.30 a.m. Suddenly at No. 2898 a bright shop announces sheepskin coats at an alarming $145 (£51.80) – Columbia University is on the starboard bow. All at once, like in a musical about college life, the streets are filled with Columbians, and Prexys' which sells ‘the hamburger with the College accent', is full of them too. The shops sell textbooks and Lautrec prints. I am jolly tired now, and the sound of the bells in the carillon at the Riverside Interdenominational Church makes me think I'm dead and in an interdenominational heaven. Away to the left Grant's tomb rises mysteriously out of its own personal mist on what is an otherwise clear day.

From the heights of Columbia, Broadway topples downhill into the lost world of immigrant New York. At La Salle Street the Broadway Subway emerges from the ground and crashes across a girder viaduct sixty feet above the valley. On the steps of the decrepit brick tenements which face it, old men in carpet slippers sit watching even older Negroes collecting junk and loading it on to their licensed carts. Ahead Broadway stretches uphill; it seems to go on forever.

North of West 125th Street it enters a decayed area of garages, spare-part depots, transmission repairers and strange churches, such as the Iglesia el Encuentro con Diaz, which I have already visited. At 135th Street the Subway vanishes underground again and the shops get smaller and smaller. They sell ‘Productos
Tropicales', ‘Chuletas' and ‘Rubo Estofado', whatever that is. Papershops sell
Mundo Americano, El Imparcial
(New York edition), Jewish newspapers, and the Italo-American
Il Progresso
. There are lots of credit jewellers and shops selling plaster statues of the Virgen del Carmen. Out on the pavements the Puerto Ricans admire their children who are taking their first faltering steps on Broadway.

All this comes to a halt with the intrusion of a bit of old America at West 153rd. The huge cemetery where Audubon of the birds is buried, and in the next hollow is Audubon Terrace where children, who presumably cannot tell the time, are waiting for the one o'clock opening of the Museum of the American Indian.

11.45 a.m. At 169th Street Broadway for the first time for sixty-six blocks ceases to be straight and I am back on Jewish Broadway with terrible dark streets leading off from it. ‘Eat Shunz's fish and live longer,' says a notice. Pass busy Leo Lichtblau, whose door proclaims ‘Attorney at Law', ‘Driving School' and ‘Taxes', the ‘Temple of Universal Light', and finally at 11.55 a.m. reach Luigi's Bar Restaurant, 4199 Broadway, at 179th Street, the last place before the George Washington Bridge and the bus terminal. The Discount Quality Cleaners on the other side of the road is No. 4198. But this is not the end of Broadway. It goes on, mile after mile, through Cuban Territory and then leaves Manhattan for the Bronx. The last identifiable stretch of Broadway is to be found in the town of Albany half way to Canada, but this is enough for one day. It really is a very long street.

TIMETABLE OF THE HEJAZ RAILWAY, AUGUST 1914 BRADSHAW'S CONTINENTAL GUIDE

Screaming southwards down the Desert Highway from Amman at eighty miles an hour with a Copt at the wheel and the horn going full blast, scattering the local inhabitants, their flocks, herds and donkeys from the crown of the road on which they congregated with old-fashioned persistence, I wondered gloomily what would happen if we mowed them down or a tyre burst. Presumably, if we knocked anyone down in this part of the world, we would be slaughtered by the survivors, which I
imagined would be the custom. If a tyre burst, at least we would be killed instantly.

Sometimes to the left of the road, sometimes crossing it to the right, and already undulating in the mirage, was the line of what had once been the Hejaz Railway, built in the 1900s by the Turkish Army on the orders of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, along the route of the pilgrim road, the Derb el Haj, from Damascus to Mecca. By the time the Sultan had been deposed in 1909, 809½ miles of this pious and strategically important work had been completed, linking Damascus to El Medina, the burial place of the prophet and, after Mecca, the most sacred city of the Muslims.

The telegraph poles along the line were the same sort that Lawrence's Beduin had so much enjoyed pulling down: cutting the wires, attaching the ends to the saddles of their riding camels and walking them away into the desert to the accompaniment of loud twanging noises. The culverts were the same cut-stone constructions that his experts had so much enjoyed blowing out with gun cotton. Even the engine of a train, when one finally appeared, pulling half a dozen assorted box-cars and flat-cars, throwing up columns of dense smoke, announcing its appearance long before it finally materialized, wheezing and groaning its way across the plateau, was the same sort of steam engine that they and the British technicians who instructed and accompanied them on their raids, had blown off the rails in dozens.

The line, and the road, traversed a wilderness that in places resembled a huge sheet of coarse sandpaper, in others milk chocolate that had melted and then set again. In spring it would have been green and filled with flowers; but this was August, the hottest month. Now the only vegetation left by the sun and the goats was as dry as cellulose at which, nevertheless, a few herds of camels nibbled lugubriously, but always on the move, in the hope of finding something better. They were guarded by young Beduin with rifles slung
across their shoulders and as we roared past they held up shiny metal bowls, begging us to give them water. True to his Christian faith the Copt ignored them, unless ordered to stop, reluctant to relieve these infidels. We passed hills crimped like pastry, little encampments of black tents, phosphate mines, endless convoys of Mercedes-Benz lorries driving north from the Jordanian port of Aqaba, and what might once have been forts or
caravanserais
of the Mecca pilgrims, now nothing but heaps of stones.

When the great Arabian explorer, Charles Doughty, set off from Muzeyrib, the assembly point for the Mecca pilgrimage, forty miles south of Damascus – ‘It was a Sunday, when this pilgrimage began, and holiday weather, the summer azure light was not all faded from the Syrian heaven; the 13th November 1876 …' – the pilgrimage consisted of something in the region of six thousand persons, of whom more than half were serving men on foot, and ten thousand camels, mules, hackneys, asses and dromedaries, in a column two miles long, some hundred yards wide in the open places, headed by the Pasha of the Pilgrimage in a litter.

Occasionally, a few cranes would lift themselves out of this desiccated landscape and flap listlessly away into the greater wilderness beyond the road and the railway. Far to the right were the high hills above the Dead Sea. Once they had been covered with forests of oak, but when the Turks built the railway they cut most of them down to provide fuel for the engines. Afterwards the Beduin and the goats finished them off completely. Now more trees were being planted to replace them, or so it was said; but to restore these forests would be the work of generations.

We reached Maan – nine marches of the Mecca caravan south of Muzeyrib – now the end of the railway line, apart from a short spur that led off in the direction of Aqaba. Here we drank beer and nibbled sandwiches which were already curling in the heat. Maan was nothing but a collection of mud houses within an
enclosing wall, clustered about a single minaret. Egyptian vultures preened themselves in a ghastly manner on the rubbish dump, contesting it with a number of brown-necked ravens. A flood had washed through the town the previous winter, and many houses and shops had been destroyed, together with a number of their occupants; but there was still an oasis of shade under the palm trees that had survived the deluge, and pomegranates, apricots and peaches grew there in season.

The station was some distance from the town. Opposite it there was a hotel, run by an Armenian, that had known better days a long time ago. I asked the stationmaster for a timetable as a memento but there had been no passenger trains for years, and now there was only one freight train a day, which came from Ras en Neqb, the railhead for Aqaba, on the spur.

In the marshalling yards there were long lines of ruined locomotives, painted in sun-bleached greens, yellows and reds. On their sides they bore brass plaques with the inscription ‘Hejaz Railway' in English and in Arabic script. Some had the names of English makers on them, others were French, and one built by Sachsenmaschinenfabrik, Chemnitz in 1918 could only have been completed in time for the armistice.

For more than five hundred and twenty miles to the south of Maan the railway was wrecked, all the way to Medina; the water-towers, culverts and rolling-stock destroyed by the Arabs and the dedicated British demolition experts, of one of whom Lawrence wrote that if he ran out of explosive he would gnaw the rails with his teeth. Down there, locomotives were still lying on their sides by what was left of the track, just as they had done when the Turks surrendered. Fifty miles down the line from Maan the railway runs through fearful country to Mudawwara Station. Close to it, in September 1917, Lawrence pushed down the handle of an exploder which the navy had given him and, to his great
surprise, blew up his first train. Now a British firm was said to be rebuilding the railway and eventually it was hoped to extend it to Mecca. All around the station at Maan there were piles of rails, points and sleepers, all new and waiting to be laid.

Beyond Ras en Neqb, nothing more than a heap of stones, the road climbed slowly to the escarpment of the Great Arabian Plateau. From it, one looked down two thousand feet to the Plain of Guweira. A strong wind was blowing across it, raising great clouds of dust and now, in the fearful heat of mid-afternoon, it resembled an enormous seething cauldron containing some pinkish preparation that was on the point of boiling over. Beyond it rose a jagged range of mountains and beyond them, according to the map, were the Gulf of Aqaba and Wadi Araba which, with the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley, formed part of the Great Rift which extends from Syria to Mozambique. Beyond the Wadi and the Gulf were Sinai, the Suez Canal and Egypt.

To the left of the Plain of Guweira was the even bigger Plain of Hisma, another former inland sea from which the waters had departed, extending sixty miles to the Saudi Arabian border and far beyond. From its floor, on which a thin scrub grew, isolated rocks and larger islands of mountain rose a thousand feet or more, some with great dunes heaped against them by the wind so that they resembled petrified waves beating against islands in a petrified sea. Somewhere in this waste the Sherif Aid, riding with Lawrence for Wadi Rumm in September 1917, had gone blind in the glare of the sun.

The driver took us down from the pass in sharp swoops through a series of appalling bends, up which lorries from Aqaba were groaning to the railhead, and out across the plain. Columns of sand were whirling across the road and as they passed over it they left long licks on its surface which were in turn picked up, turned into more miniature columns and whirled away by the wind,
which was like a blast from an open furnace. To the right of the road a dark drift of nomads on camels were reaching across the wind into the eye of the sun, all muffled to the eyes, heading towards the Sha'fat Ibn Jad, the jagged range we had seen from the plateau.

After about ten miles in this inferno we reached Guweira, a small ancient settlement where, in Trajan's time, the Romans had built a fort. It had also been a Turkish garrison in the time of the last Sultans and a camel-market, of the Howeitat Beduin, for longer, probably, than it had served either Turks or Romans. Now lorries outnumbered camels by a hundred to one. They were everywhere, parked in droves outside the tin shanties that served as shops and cafés by the roadside. It was as if a monster pull-up on some transcontinental American highway had been transported to the Arabian desert.

Beyond Guweira we left the road and followed a camel track that led, sixty miles to the south-east, to Mudawwara, once a station on the Hejaz Railway. This was the route that Lawrence had taken, riding out of Wadi Rumm with the mutually hostile tribes which he held together, for their first successful attack on a train – an attack which brought the Beduin so much loot that the whole force had been in danger of melting away and returning to its tents. This same track was also used by a battalion of the British Imperial Camel Corps when they attacked and took the station in August 1918, having crossed the desert from Egypt to Aqaba. We were only just in time to travel on this track and see it much as it had always been. Even then the Jordanians, with American aid, were making a motor-road out to the foot of Wadi Rumm, where a tourist rest-house was to be built.

Knowing this and seeing the Beduin swaying through the tamarisk on their camels that were more like plants on stalks than creatures, with the sultry red mountains to the right now in deep
shadow, and the astonishing, isolated outcrops banked with driven sand looming up in the Plain of Hisma, I felt that I was lucky to be where I was before these changes took place. At the same time I felt cut off from any genuine sensation of desert travel, riding to Wadi Rumm in a truck, when I should have been racing towards it on camel-back; but it was too late for these nostalgic, juvenile longings; and anyway it was time to make camp.

Seen as we came into it in the early morning, with the sun shining across it, illuminating its western walls, the Wadi was a stupendous, unearthly sight. Twelve miles long and three thousand feet above the sea, it seemed not only large enough to contain the entire Arab Army of the Revolt, as Lawrence wrote, but also part of the Turkish one. On either side of its flat and slightly inclined floor, two miles across at its widest point, like the parting of the Dead Sea in some super-colossal film of the de Mille era, the opposing granite cliffs of Jebel Um 'Ishrin and Jebel Rumm rose two and a half thousand feet sheer in the air, capped with white sandstone that was like foam on their crests; while in the extreme distance, beyond the place where the cliffs ended, a single, detached mountain, Jebel Khazail, was also beginning to glow as the sun rose upon it.

In a remarkable passage in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Lawrence describes the temptations of Wadi Rumm and the mountain of Khazail:

Landscapes in childhood's dream were so vast and silent. We looked backward through our memory for the prototype up which all men had walked between such walls towards an open square as that in front where this road seemed to end. Later, when we were often riding inland, my mind used to turn me from the direct road, to clear my senses by a night in Wadi Rumm and by the ride down its dawn-lit valley towards that glowing square which my
timid anticipation never let me reach. I would say, ‘Shall I ride on this time, beyond the Khazail, and know it all?' But in truth I liked Rumm too much.

For six miles or so we ground on through the coarse sand until we came to a fort of the Desert Police. In the distance it had looked minute and now, standing in the lee of the cliffs of Jebel Rumm, it seemed a toy fort.

It was a square, archetypal desert fort, built of red sandstone and surrounded by barbed wire and shaded by a single casuarina tree. Outside the aristocratic camels used in the desert patrol browsed in a compound. The fort had two loopholed watch-towers and curious shafts on their outward walls which, in a full-sized fortress, would have been intended for pouring boiling oil or molten lead on the heads of an attacking force. Here, with molten lead and boiling oil hard to come by, and boiling water at a premium, they must have had some more mundane use.