‘I think you are very wise,’ I said, ‘and very kind.’ He sighed again. ‘It would have been pleasant if it had been otherwise, but I can see–yes, this is the right way.’ He pressed my hand warmly, raised it to his lips, and departed from my life for ever. He was a nice man–kindness itself–and I owe it to him that I saw the sights of Constantinople under pleasant auspices. Next day I was called on by Cook’s representatives in the most conventional fashion, and taken across the Bosphorus to Haidar Pasha, where I resumed my journey on the Orient Express. I was glad to have my guide with me, for anything more like a lunatic asylum than Haidar Pasha Station cannot be imagined. Everyone shouted, screamed, thumped, and demanded the attention of the Customs Officer. I was introduced then to the technique of Cook’s Dragomen. ‘You give me one pound note now,’ he said. I gave him one pound note. He immediately sprang up on the Customs benches and waved the note aloft. ‘Here, here,’ he called. ‘Here, here!’ His cries proved effective. A customs gentleman covered with gold braid hurried in our direction, put large chalk marks all over my baggage, said to me ‘I wish you good voyage’–and departed to harry those who had not as yet adopted the Cook’s one pound procedure. ‘And now I settle you in train,’ said Cook’s man. ‘And now?’ I was a little doubtful how much, but as I was looking among my Turkish money–some change, in fact, which had been given me on the wagon lit–he said with some firmness, ‘It is better that you keep that money. It may be useful. You give me another pound note.’ Rather doubtful about this but reflecting that one has to learn by experience, I yielded him another pound note, and he departed with salutation and benedictions. There was a subtle difference on passing from Europe into Asia. It was as though time had less meaning. The train ambled on its way, running by the side of the Sea of Marmara, and climbing mountains–it was incredibly beautiful all along this way. The people in the train now were different too–though it is difficult to describe in what the difference lay. I felt cut off, but far more interested in what I was doing and where I was going. When we stopped at the stations I enjoyed looking out, seeing the motley crowd of costumes, peasants thronging the platform, and the strange meals of cooked food that were handed up to the train. Food on skewers, wrapped in leaves, eggs painted various colours–all sorts of things. The meals became more unpalatable and fuller of hot, greasy, tasteless morsels as we went further East. Then, on the second evening, we came to a halt, and people got out of the train to look at the Cilician Gates. It was a moment of incredible beauty. I have never forgotten it. I was to pass that way many times again. both going to and coming from the Near East and, as the train schedules changed, I stopped there at different times of day and night: sometimes in the early morning, which was indeed beautiful; sometimes, like this first time, in the evening at six o’clock; sometimes, regrettably, in the middle of the night. This first time I was lucky. I got out with the others and stood there. The sun was slowly setting, and the beauty indescribable. I was so glad then that I had come–so full of thankfulness and joy. I got back into the train, whistles blew, and we started down the long side of a mountain gorge, passing from one side to the other, and coming out on the river below. So we came slowly down through Turkey and into Syria at Aleppo. Before we reached Aleppo, however, I had a short spell of bad luck. I was, as I thought, badly bitten by mosquitoes, up my arms and the back of my neck, and on my ankles and knees. I was still so innocent of travel abroad that I did not recognise that what I had been bitten by was not mosquitoes but bed-bugs, and that I was going to be all my life peculiarly susceptible to such bites. They came out of the old-fashioned wooden railway carriages, and fed hungrily on the juicy travellers in the train. My temperature rose to 102 and my arms swelled. Finally, with the aid of a kindly French commercial traveller, I slit the sleeves of my blouse and coat–my arms were so swelled inside them that there was nothing else one could do. I had fever, headache and misery, and thought to myself, ‘What a mistake I have made to come on this journey!’ However, my French friend was very helpful: he got out and purchased some grapes for me–the small sweet grapes which you get in that part of the world. ‘You will not want to eat,’ he said. ‘I can see that you have fever. It is better that you stick to these grapes.’ Though trained by mother and grandmothers to wash all food before eating it abroad, I no longer cared about this advice. I fed myself with grapes every quarter of an hour, and they relieved a lot of the fever. I certainly did not want to eat anything else. My kind Frenchman said goodbye to me at Aleppo, and by the next day my swelling had abated and I was feeling better. When I finally arrived at Damascus, after a long weary day in a train that never seemed to go more than five miles an hour, and constantly paused at something hardly distinguishable from the surroundings but which was called a station, I emerged into the midst of clamour, porters seizing baggage off me, screaming and yelling, and other ones seizing it from them in turn, the stronger wrestling with the weaker. I finally discerned outside the station a handsome looking motor-bus labelled Orient Palace Hotel, A grand person in livery rescued me and my baggage, and together with one or two other bewildered voyagers we piled in and were driven to the hotel, where a room had been reserved for me. It was a most magnificent hotel, with large marble glittering halls–but with such poor electric light: that one could hardly see one’s surroundings. Having been ushered up marble steps and shown into an enormous apartment, I mooted the question of a bath with a kindly-looking female who came in answer to a bell, and who seemed to understand a few words of French.
‘Man arrange,’ she said. She elucidated further: ‘Un homme–un type–il va arranger.’ She nodded reassuringly and disappeared. I was a little doubtful as to what ‘tin type’ was, but it seemed in the end that it was the bath attendant, the lowest of the low, dressed in a great deal of striped cotton, who finally ushered my dressing-gowned form into a kind of basement apartment. Here he turned various taps and wheels. Boiling water ran out all over the stone floor, and steam filled the air so that I was unable to see. He nodded, smiled, gestured, gave me to understand that all was well, and departed. He had turned off everything before going, and the water had all run away through the trough in the floor. I was uncertain as to what I was meant to do next. I really dared not turn on the boiling water again. There were about eight or ten small wheels and knobs round the walls, any one of which, I felt, might produce a different phenomenon–such as a shower of boiling water on my head. In the end I took off my bedroom slippers and other garments and padded about, washing myself in steam rather than risking the dangers of actual water. For a moment I felt homesick. How long would it be before I should enter a familiar shiny-papered apartment with a solid white porcelain tub and two taps labelled hot and cold which one turned on according to one’s taste? As far as I remember, I had three days in Damascus, during which I duly did my sight-seeing, shepherded by the invaluable Cook’s. On one occasion I made an expedition to some Crusader castle, in company with an American engineer–engineers seemed pretty thick on the ground all through the Near East–and a very aged clergyman. We met for the first time as we took our places in the car at 8.30. The aged clergyman, beneficence itself, had made up his mind that the American engineer and I were man and wife. He addressed us as such. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said the American engineer. ‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I am so sorry that he thinks you are my husband.’ The phrase seemed somewhat ambiguous, and we both laughed. The old clergyman treated us to a dissertation on the merits of married life, the necessity of give and take, and wished us all happiness. We gave up explaining, or trying to explain–he appeared so distressed when the American engineer shouted into his ear that we were not married that it seemed better to leave things as they were. ‘But you ought to get married,’ he insisted, shaking his head. ‘Living in sin, you know, it doesn’t do–it really doesn’t do.’ I went to see lovely Baalbek, I visited the bazaars, and the Street called Straight, bought many of the attractive brass plates they make there. Each plate was made by hand, a
nd each pattern peculiar to the one family that made it. Sometimes it was a design of fish, with threads of silver and brass raised in a pattern running all over it. There is something fascinating in thinking of each family with its pattern handed down from father to son and to grandson, with no one else ever copying it and nobody mass-producing it. I imagine that if you were to go to Damascus now you would find few of the old craftsmen and their families left: there would be factories instead. Already in those days the inlaid wooden boxes and tables had become stereotyped and universally reproduced–still done by hand, but in conventional patterns and ways. I also bought a chest of drawers–a huge one, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver–the sort of furniture that reminds one of fairyland. It was despised by the Dragoman who was guiding me.
‘Not good work that,’ he said. ‘Quite old–fifty years old, sixty years old, more perhaps. Old-fashioned, you understand. Very old-fashioned. Not new.’ I said I could see that it wasn’t new and that there weren’t many of them. Perhaps there would never be another one made.
‘No. Nobody make that now. You come and look at this box. See? Very good. And this here. Here is a chest of drawers here. You see? It has many woods in it. You see how many different woods it has? Eighty-five different woods.’ The net result, I thought, was hideous. I wanted my mother-of-pearl, ivory and silver chest. The only thing that worried me was how I was ever going to get it home to England–but that apparently held no difficulties. I was passed on through Cook’s to somebody else, to the hotel, to a firm of shippers, and finally made various arrangements and calculations, with the result that nine or ten months later an almost forgotten mother-of-pearl and silver chest turned up in South Devon. That was not the end of the story. Though it was a glorious thing to look at, and capacious inside, it produced in the middle of the night a strange noise, as if large teeth were champing something. Some creature was eating my beautiful chest. I took the drawers out and examined them. There seemed no sign of tooth-marks or holes. Yet night after night, after the witching hour of midnight, I could hear ‘Crump, crump, crump‘. At last I took one of the drawers out and carried it to a firm in London which was said to specialize in tropical wood-pests. They agreed immediately that something sinister was at work in the recesses of the wood. The only thing would be to remove the wood entirely and re-line it. This, I may say, was going to add heavily to the expense–in fact it would probably cost three times as much as the chest itself had done and twice as much as its fare to England. Still, I could no longer bear that ghostly munching and gnawing. About three weeks later I was rung up and an excited voice said ‘Madam, can you come down to the shop here. I should really like you to see what I have got.’ I was in London at the time, so I hurried round immediately–and was shown with pride a repulsive cross between a worm and a slug. It was large and white and obscene, and had clearly enjoyed its diet of wood so much as to make it obese beyond belief. It had eaten nearly all the surrounding wood in two of the drawers. After a few more weeks my chest was returned to me, and thereafter the night hours held only silence.
After intensive sightseeing that only increased my determination to return to Damascus and explore much more there, the day came when I was to undertake my journey across the desert to Baghdad. At this time the service was done by a big fleet of six-wheeler cars or buses which were operated by the Nairn Line. Two brothers, Gerry and Norman Nairn, ran this. They were Australians, and the most friendly of men. I became acquainted with them on the night before my trip, when they were both busy in an amateurish way making up cardboard boxes of lunch, and invited me to help them.
The bus started at dawn. Two hefty young drivers were on the job, and when I came out following my baggage they were busy stowing a couple of rifles into the car, carelessly throwing an armful of rugs over them.
‘Can’t advertise that we’ve got these, but I wouldn’t care to cross the desert without them,’ said one.
‘Hear we’ve got the Duchess of Alwiyah on this run,’ said the other. ‘God Almighty,’ said the first. ‘We’ll have trouble there, I expect. What does she want this time, do you think?’ Everything upside down and down side up,’ said the other. At that moment a procession arrived down the steps of the hotel. To my surprise, and I am afraid not to my pleasure, the leading figure was none other than Mrs C., from whom I had parted at Trieste. I had imagined that by now she would have already got to Baghdad, since I had lingered to see the sights.
‘I thought you would be on this run,’ she said, greeting me with pleasure. ‘Everything is fixed up, and I am carrying you back with me to Alwiyah. It would have been quite impossible for you to have stayed in any hotel in Baghdad.’ What could I say? I was captured. I had never been to Baghdad, and never seen the hotels there. They might, for all I knew, be one seething mass of fleas, bed-bugs, lice, snakes, and the kind of pale cockroach that I particularly abhor. So I had to stammer some thanks. We ensconced ourselves, and I realised that ‘The Duchess of Alwiyah’ was none other than my friend Mrs C. She refused at once the seat she had been given as too near the rear of the bus, where she was always sick. She must have the front seat behind the driver. But that had been reserved by an Arab lady weeks ago. The Duchess of Alwiyah merely waved a hand. Nobody counted, apparently, but Mrs C. She gave the impression that she was the first European woman ever to set foot in the city of Baghdad, before whose whims all else must fall down. The Arab lady arrived and defended her seat. Her husband took her part, and a splendid free-for-all ensued. A French lady also made claim, and a German general, too, made himself difficult. I don’t know what arguments were urged, but, as usual on this earth, four of the meek were dispossessed of the better seats and more or less thrown into the back of the car. The German general, the French lady, the Arab lady, shrouded in veils, and Mrs C. were left with the honours of war. I have never been a good fighter and did not stand a chance, though actually my seat number would have entitled me to one of these desirable positions. In due course we rumbled off. Having been fascinated by rolling across the yellow sandy desert, with its undulating sand-dunes and rocks, I finally became more or less hypnotised by the sameness of the surroundings, and opened a book. I had never been car-sick in my life but the action of the six-wheeler, if you were sitting towards the back of it, was much the same motion as a ship, and what with that and reading I was severely sick before I knew what had happened to me. I felt deeply disgraced, but Mrs C. was very kind to me, and said it often took people unawares. Next time she would see to it that I had one of the front seats. The forty-eight hour trip across the desert was fascinating and rather sinister. It gave one the curious feeling of being enclosed rather than surrounded by a void. One of the first things I was to realise was that at noon it was impossible to tell whether you were going north, south, east or west, and I learnt that it was at this time of day when the big six-wheeled cars most often went off the track. On one of my later journeys across the desert this did actually happen. One of the drivers–one of the most experienced too–discovered himself, after two or three hours, driving across the desert in the direction of Damascus, with his back turned to Baghdad. It happened at the point where the tracks divided. There was a maze of tracks all over the surface. On that occasion a car appeared in the distance, shooting off a rifle, and the driver took an even wider loop than usual. He thought he had got back on to the track, but actually he was driving in the opposite direction. Between Damascus and Baghdad there is nothing but a great stretch of desert–no landmarks, and only one halt in the whole place: the big fort of Rutbah. We reached there, I think, about midnight. Suddenly, out of the darkness, there loomed a flickering light. We had arrived. The great gates of the fortress were unbarred. Beside the door, on the alert, their rifles raised, were the Guards of the Camel Corps, prepared for bandits masquerading as bona fide travellers. Their wild dark faces were rather frightening. We were scrutinised and allowed to pass in, and the gates were shut behind us. There were a few rooms there with bedsteads, and we had three h
ours’ rest, five or six women to a room. Then we went on again. About five or six in the morning, when dawn came, we had breakfast in the desert. Nowhere in the world is there such a good breakfast as tinned sausages cooked on a primus stove in the desert in the early morning. That and strong black tea fulfilled all one’s needs, and revived one’s flagging energy; and the lovely colours all over the desert–pale pinks, apricots and blues–with the sharp-toned air, made a wonderful ensemble. I was entranced. This was what I longed for. This was getting away from everything–with the pure invigorating morning air, the silence, the absence even of birds, the sand that ran through one’s fingers, the rising sun, and the taste of sausages and tea. What else could one ask of life? Then we moved on, and came at last to Felujah on the Euphrates, went over the bridge of boats, past the air station at Habbaniyah, and on again, until we began to see palm-groves and a raised road. In the distance, on the left, we saw the golden domes of Kadhimain, then on and over another bridge of boats, over the river Tigris, and so into Baghdad–along a street full of rickety buildings, with a beautiful mosque with turquoise domes standing, it seemed to me, in the middle of the street. I never had a chance even to look at a hotel. I was transferred by Mrs C. and her husband Eric, to a comfortable car, and driven along the one main street that is Baghdad, past the statue of General Maude and out from the city, with great rows of palms on either side of the road, and herds of black beautiful buffaloes watering in pools of water. It was like nothing I had seen before. Then we came to houses and gardens full of flowers–not so many as there would have been later in the year…And there I was–in what I sometimes thought of as Mem-Sahib Land.
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