Free The Baghdad Railway Club by Andrew Martin Page A

river. You sail.’
    He was paddling towards an iron ladder that went down into the water amid floating rubbish. I climbed down the ladder, and into his boat. It was like one of the swinging boats of a fairground detached from its chains.
    ‘What’s on the other side?’ I said, just for something to say.
    ‘Same town,’ he said, smiling but paddling hard against the current.
    A white launch was bearing down on us, a group of uniformed and un-uniformed white men standing on the prow.
    As it went by, and we bounced on its backwash, my companion nodded at me, saying, ‘Kokus,’ and then, trying again, ‘. . . Coxus.’
    I frowned at him.
    ‘Coxus,’ he repeated, grinning. ‘Your friend! Coxus!’
    It broke in on me that he was referring to the Chief Political Officer.
    ‘You mean Cox ?’ I said. ‘Sir Percy Cox?’
    He nodded briefly, having already lost interest in the matter. He was fighting the current, the sound of which was now loud in my ears. Gas lights of a pale blue glimmered on the bank we’d left behind, whereas the bank we were making towards was half enclosed in darkness. I could not tell whether its buildings were newly made and barely finished, or so old that they were crumbling away. Having passed the middle of the river, my pilot was now resting, letting the current carry us, and smiling as it did so. But a minute later, he was all action again, using his oar to steer as we ran up fast on to the opposite bank. We were on a narrow beach, lying beyond the main run of buildings. There were palm trees, two long wicker benches with shades built over.
    ‘Baksheesh,’ said my pilot.
    I had dreaded this moment. I fished in my pocket and handed over a single rupee, which my pilot began examining closely. Say it was worth 9d. That would be a decent, if irregular, sum to tip a station porter in London or York. But this fellow was not a station porter, and we were not in London or York. On the contrary, I was on a ghostly river-beach of black and orange sand, in rapidly fading light but with the heat still like a weight upon me. My companion was now looking at me slightly sidelong. He had found the coin acceptable, and secreted it somewhere in his robe. I was free to go.
    I put my boot into two inches of brown water, as the fellow began again his struggle with the current of the Tigris.
    . . . Low buildings, including some low domes with green and gold-coloured tiles that would have been beautiful were it not for the dirt . . . One shuttered place had a wooden board across the front: an Arabic word and ‘Koffe’. Was this the place Boyd was supposed to recommend to me, the Salon de Thé of Baghdad station being closed? A man sat smoking in front of it. He was surrounded by a sort of display of the circular boats. He had passed the long, hot day in putting pitch on them judging by the black spatterings on his long shirt. I nodded at him, and he tipped his head back, blowing smoke rather haughtily in my direction. The broken buildings extended back not more than three or four streets, and there was very little life in them. At one junction of alleyways, I saw a knife-grinder, his grindstone on a barrow. He pedalled the stone, sharpening a long blade, and a kid sat on the broken pavement at his feet. He might have been a customer, the owner of the blade. But he looked more like the knife-grinder’s disciple.
    ‘Salaam alaikum!’ I called to the pair, and they looked at me as if I was mad.
    I was now at the limit of the buildings, and had begun walking over a waste of dust and rubble littered with old bricks and tiles. I made out a low sign in the fading light: ‘Ranges’. I contemplated it for a while, hearing still the creak of the knife-grinder’s wheel.
    Instead of a shooting range, the sign seemed to indicate a sort of warehouse that had partly exploded, for there were piles of its own bricks all around it: one of the buildings blown up by the Turks before they quit town, perhaps. I’d been told