Free Orient Express by John Dos Passos Page B

wheels. It was driven by a stocky man in a white wool cap named Karim. In a little sling behind there crouched among some bags of oats an obscene broad-faced imp that Karim was continually shouting at under the name of Maa’mat. Thus with our legs stuck out over the baggage and our laps full of green and yellow melons and the springs of the seat cunningly gouging the marrow out of our spines we jingled, dragging a great bellying dustcloud like a comet’s tail, past the Blue Mosque and out of Tabriz.
    The entry into Persia had been made at Djulfa on the Araxes some days before. After the rawness of the death things and birth things of Russia, the balm of an old and feeble and graceful civilization was marvellously soothing. I remember scrambling off the locomotive that had brought us across the international bridge into the tremendous glare of sun of the valley of Djulfa where not a green tree grew among the pink and yellow cliffs that swayed like stage scenery in the heat that boxed it in on every side. Almost immediately we were ushered into a cool room with mud walls of a pinkish puttycolor on which were hung a couple of rugs, and little copper ewers of water were brought, and the Sayyid and I sat with our shoes off before an enormous and epoch-making watermelon being waited on by a tiny little man named Astulla Khan who had one side of his face swollen with toothache and his whole head bound about with a white cloth tied at the top so as to leave two long pointed ends the way people’s faces used to be done up in the picturebooks of a hundred years ago. Then after lunch when mattresses had been brought and great pink cylindrical pillows, we lay drowsily through an endless afternoon, looking at the smooth mud ceiling and at the portrait of the Shah woven in one of the rugs on the wall, and out into the court where a tame partridge strutted about the edge of a little pool and where a kitten lay prone on a patch of blue and crimson rug in the sunlight. There was not a sound except for very occasionally the discreet bubbling of Astulla Khan’s waterpipe from the next room. One felt endless ages of well-modulated indolence settling like fine silk cloths over one’s restlessness. Perhaps this was the garden beyond pain and pleasure where Epicurus whiled away passionless days. At last the kitten got up, stretched each white leg in turn and strolled without haste over to the pool. The sunlight was already ruddy and cast long shadows. The hills beyond the Araxes were bright rose with purple and indigo shadows. The Sayyid got to his feet, dusted his trousers and muttered meditatively—Quel théâtre! Whereupon Astulla Khan appeared staggering under an enormous shining samovar and the business of the day was on again.
    Out of the plain of Tabriz we climbed a dry pass and ate our own dust up a long incline until another valley full of poplartrees and mudwalled villages opened up at our feet and we found ourselves rattling and bouncing down hill again. At Basmich where we lunched there was a memorable garden. It was there the Sayyid first got lyrical. We sprawled under silvery aspens in a garden full of green grass and little shining watercourses and a boy with his hair cut a little below the ears like a pageboy out of the Middle Ages, wearing a tight belted tunic and straight loose pants of bright blue, brought us tea and a lapful of red apples. Then the Sayyid sat bolt upright and half closed his eyes and chanted in droning cadence the poem of Hafiz I have since found in Miss Bell:
    â€œA flower-tinted cheek, the flowery close
    Of the fair earth, these are enough for me —
    Enough that in the meadow wanes and grows
    The shadow of a graceful cypress tree.
    I am no lover of hypocrisy;
    Of all the treasures that the earth can boast
    A brimming cup of wine I prize the most —
    This is enough for me!”
    â€”Quel théâtre! cried the Sayyid when he had finished and put a piece of sugar in his