Orient Express (15 page)

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 given 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.

Twelfth Day:
Terrific cold wind. Too cold to do anything but crouch over the fire with your eyes full of smoke.

Went to call on the Damascus merchants who brought me over the cakes the other day. Their little boy produced, to everyone's pride and delight, two or three phrases of excellent English. His elder brother knows about five words of French so we had a roaring conversation. Their father seemed extremely gloomy about our prospects and suggested that we'd probably turn back to Baghdad. But the little boy, who can't be more than ten, heartened everybody by saying,—We weel shoot Bedawi with the gun and keel him.

I don't entirely like the enthusiasm with which these Delaim people look over my possessions. Three superb rascals have just left my tent. They sat there a long time with baksheesh on the tip of their tongues. They felt of the canvas and of my aba and poked at the hippo and asked what was inside it, and their eyes sparkled with greed at the sight of the silver-incrusted saddle El Souadi lent me. I tried to glut them with cigarettes.

Bad. About noon. The wind's like a razor, and the camp is knocked flat with dismay. The merry men of ibn Kubain have called our bluff and driven off our camels from the grazing grounds. From the little hillock with the cairn I saw them disappearing behind the horizon. People rushed out from camp and shot off guns, but the Kubain people are stronger than we are, or at least they have more nerve.

Baghdad Saleh has just come in without his British army coat or his new red ismak, dragging his feet and looking very dejected:—Bloody Bedawi, bloody loosewilers steal bloody seecamels. He explained that he was asleep at the time or it would never have happened. He was beaten up and his gun was stolen and his coat and his new head-cloth—Bedawi no good.

I went and found Jassem, who was sitting in the lee of some bales of tobacco, beside the ashes of a fire. He smiled gloomily and nodding to the horizon made a gesture of coins running through his fingers and said with great emphasis, Floos, floos ketir, money, much money. So I went sulkily back to my tent. Well, the walking was probably excellent. It would be farewell to the hippo and its nonsensical contents. Perhaps we'd all be carried off into servitude in some lost oasis. So long as I don't lose my glasses, I was thinking. I lay shivering on the camp bed wrapped up in the Baghdad blanket. Molière had lost his flavor and drawing seemed a futile occupation. All the wind of heaven whistled round my legs. The tent was no more protection than a sieve. The leaden day was already shattered into tumultuous twilight when I heard a familiar delicious
cupalaoop
in the distance and the grumbling of camels. The camels were being driven home. They drifted one by one into camp, craning their necks absentmindedly from side to side until the whole space between the fires was full of their roaring and bubbling.

Thirteenth Day:
It's all a farce played according to rules. The Delaim went after ibn Kubain's people and brought back the camels, and everything is where it started. We'll pay the safety money and I suppose the Delaim will get some of it for their trouble. The insh'allahs about leaving tomorrow are pretty feeble so I guess we'll round out the week in this accursed spot. My only amusement is sitting on the cairn and watching the flocks of the Delaim move slowly among the scrub-littered valleys round the waterholes. I'm sick of Molière.
And the stars in their courses fought against Sisera
.

Yesterday afternoon, after the crisis was over, the camp became very social. Groups of the Delaim and the Fede'an roamed about from campfire to campfire. I sat in state on my camp bed and everyone came and sat on the floor of my tent and was silent. Got very chummy with a young man of ibn Kubain's people who wore his hair in two little plaits neatly looped in front of his ears. He showed me his Turkish rifle and said he was the Osmanli's own man. Feeling it was up to me to do something to promote the Christmas spirit, I gave everybody cigarettes and handfuls of tobacco. The man with the little plaits I liked so much, I gave a box of matches. Whereupon he offered to go with me to Esch Scham or over the sea or anywhere. Then I would give him many gold pounds Turkish. I tried to explain that I was a fakir, a poor man, and had no floos of any sort, but he would not believe me. At that point Nuwwaf came in. Now Nuwwaf is a friend of Feisul's and a deadly enemy of the Fede'an and was much annoyed to find me so friendly with a mere bandit. I didn't have enough Arabic to explain to him that I liked these little brown hardboiled people better than the big white Delaim with their waxed moustaches, even if they were holding us up. He went off looking very hurt.

It's a cloudy stagnant day. The elders of Israel sit round Jassem's fire where Fahad is cooking disgustedly pots and pots of rice to feed this multitude. Now and then a gust of dispute rises and is caught up by other groups round other smoky fires, or there is an impressive clink of moneybags.

Fourteenth Day:
Rained cats and dogs in the night, so we have to wait another day before starting, as camels are as helpless in mud as a giraffe on skates. That's five days going in two weeks. Damn all delays. I have the immortal itch to be gone from these cheezy hills where the sheep graze dully as maggots and the tents of the Delaim lie like dead beetles along the horizon. Was called on today, right after my lunch of oatmeal and condensed milk, by my Osmanli friend and the little crosseyed boy who is sheikh of the ibn Kubain crowd and a great mob of our yesterday's enemies. The little sheikh showed me with pride a German trench periscope he had; several of his men had field glasses. Everybody was having a social time when the fat sheikh and Jassem er Rawwaf came and drove them all away. Evidently the caravan does not approve of the way I get on with our enemies. That's the hell of being a hakim and sitting in a crimson tent. Everything you do has political significance. Nuwwaf came to see me later, looking very offended and making various unfriendly comments about the Fede'an. I cheered him up by having Jassem's little boy bring us coffee, and then we walked up to the cairn and he pointed westward along the marked trail. Five days that way to El Garrá where his flocks were. If I could stay with him he'd have a sheep killed for me. I should stay with him many days, very many days, always; and for a moment, leaning against the enormous ceaseless wind that whined and rattled among the little stones of the cairn, I thought I would. To live always in a tent of black felt eating unleavened bread and ewe's butter, with the wind always sheer in your nostrils, moving south in winter, north in summer, for the grazing of the camels and sheep; to take a shrill-voiced Bedawi woman for a wife, to die of a rifleshot in a raid and be buried under a pile of stones beside the ashes of your fire and the round dungheaps of your last camping ground. Will the world hold anything to make up for the not living of that life?

I came back very hungry to my tent and had Fahad cook me my last can of kosher sausage. The tent soars like a balloon in the wind.