Free Orient Express by John Dos Passos

shoots into the zenith. A man is standing beside the dying woman, awkwardly holding a glass of water in one hand. From the other end of the station comes the whining jig of a Georgian tune played on bagpipe and tomtom, to which soldiers are dancing. The woman’s face seems to shrivel as you look at it. Behind Ararat a triangular patch of dazzle that rims with silver the inner edges of the two peaks is all that is left of the sun. On the wind comes a sour smell of filth and soldiers and garbage. The Sayyid, hunched dejectedly on the mysterious packing case in the middle of the boxcar, cries out feebly, shaking his head, Avec quelle difficulté.
    Then without a word he gets up and closes the door on the side where the dead woman lies on the red and yellow mat beside the track.
    Late that night, when I was wandering about in the moonlight with a glass of wine—the faithful Ismail had got us a bottle from the Lord knows where—trying to avoid the swarms of mosquitoes, I heard the Sayyid’s voice raised in shrill discussion and often reiterated the phrase Courrier Diplomatique. Not being partial to discussions, I lengthened my walk up the track. When I returned everything was quiet. It appeared that certain people had tried to invade the sanctity of our private boxcar, but that in the middle of the discussion they had all been arrested for travelling without proper passes, which, according to the Sayyid, was an example of the direct action of Providence.
    6. Nakhtchevan
    Another freightyard, empty this time, except for a long hospital-train. Flies swarm in the stifling heat. The town is several miles away at the end of a scorching sandy road. The engine has disappeared and the few boxcars still remaining on the train seem abandoned. People lie about limply in the patch of shade under the cars. The cars themselves are like ovens. An occasional breath of wind stirs the upper branches of a skinny acacia on the platform beside the shed where tea used to be served out in the old days, but none of the breeze ever seems to reach the freight-yard. The Sayyid, sweating at every pore, is slicing a watermelon that we have to gobble hastily under handkerchiefs to keep the flies from getting ahead of us. Meanwhile the Sayyid delivers a lecture on the virtue and necessity of patience for those engaged in occupations cognate to that of courrier diplomatique. Having eaten all the melon possible, and having definitely discovered that we are due to stay in Nakhtchevan some eight hours more, I climb into the car and cover my head with a sheet against the flies with the faint hope that the heat will stupefy me into sleep. Baste it in the Dutch oven; the phrase somehow bobs up in my mind and the picture of a small boy watching fascinated the process of pouring gravy over the roast chicken, while it is placed against the front of the grate of the stove in a shiny tin onesided contraption. I wonder vaguely if I’m getting the rich sizzly brown the chickens used to get in their Dutch oven. Flies drone endlessly outside the sheet. Their droning resolves itself into the little song they sang in the Paris streets round the time of the signing of the so-called peace:
    I’ fallait pas, i’ fallait pas, i’ fallait pa-as y-aller .
    Then from outside comes the voice of the Sayyid in his best style holding forth on pan-Islam and the resurrection of Persia. He must have found a Mussulman. One’s head is like a soupkettle simmering on the back of the stove. Thoughts move slowly about in a thick gravy of stupor. Armenia. A second’s glimpse of a war map with little flags, Russian, Turkish, British. What a fine game it is. The little flags move back and forth. Livelier than chess. Then the secret intelligence map. Such extraordinary cleverness. We’ll exploit the religion of A to make him fight B, we’ll buy up the big men of D so that they’ll attack A in the rear, then when everybody’s down we’ll