Free Orient Express by John Dos Passos Page A

neatly carve up the map. The flies are droning: Carve dat turkey, carve him to de heart. Call the sections Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Turks, Kourds. But somehow when everybody’s down they can’t find the carving knife. So everybody just stays down and when they get tired of massacring each other they find they are starving. And death and the desert encroach, encroach. Where last year was a wheat field, this year is a patch of thistles, and next year not even thistles will grow there. And the peasants are beggars or bandits. And that’s all there is of the map game in the East for the present. But the sheet’s in a knot and lets in the flies. I’ll climb down to see what the Sayyid’s telling his audience.
    The Sayyid is saying that the East must settle its own problems, that the Mohammedans of the world must wake from their stupor of acceptance, that they must drive out the foreigners who exploit them, and organize their nations themselves. He says many fine things, but he does not say how the little ragged children, tiny wide-eyed skeletons with hideous swollen bellies, shall be fed, or how the grain shall be bought for the autumn sowing.
    There are a dozen of these little children, in all stages of starvation, crawling about under the cars looking for scraps; they are not like animals, because any other animal than man would have long since been dead. The Sayyid has talked to some of them in turki; some are of Muslim parents from Ervian; some are Christians from the Lake of Van; some don’t know whether their parents were Christian or Muslim, and seem to remember nothing in all their hungry lives, but this freightyard and the scraps of food the soldiers throw to them—This is the eighth month, says the Sayyid. In three months, winter, and they will all die.
    7. Djulfa (August 21, 1921)
    That evening politik, as the Sayyid calls it, waxed furious. It came out that the engine could pull only two cars at a time up from Nakhtchevan to Djulfa. The contending parties were the Sayyid and a group of vaguely official Armenians. The station master was enticed into our car and fed tea and cigarettes and, when the doors had been closed to keep out prying eyes, was slipped a couple of paper Turkish pounds. Even then, the thing was not assured until, by a brilliant coup, a doctor, the most important member of the other party, was detached and offered a place in our car. The foiled looked daggers at us as we clanked out of the station behind a spluttering little engine. The moon was almost full. The track wound up through a craggy gorge beside a stream through cool intensely dry mountain air. I sat most of the night on the mysterious packing case beside the open door breathing in the cleanness of the sheer desert rock. Not a blade of grass, no life, no suffering anywhere, only cliffs and great escarped mountains and the stony riverbed, and beyond every upward turn of the valley crouched unimaginably new things, Persia.
    And Adjerbeidjan that night slipped from out the shaggy present into the neat daintily colored past, as Armenia had the night we left Bakh-nurashin, and at another station of which I never knew the name, saw, while our nostrils were full of the stench of starving people asleep, and a pipe played sighingly somewhere teased our ears, the last glimmer in the moonlight of the tall disdainful peak of Ararat.

    Traintime: Beni Ounif

VI. OF PHAETONS
    1. Garden of Epicurus
    â€”The phaeton is ready, mssiou, said the longnosed waiter with a wave of the hand across the samovar. As he spoke the street outside filled suddenly with the jingling of bells.
    When I suggested that the springs stuck into my back the Sayyid was offended in his national pride and sulked until on our way through the bazaar we upset a donkey loaded with clay pots that fell on a heap of watermelons and put everybody in a good humor. The phaeton was vaguely like a small victoria perched above a perilous system of ropes and