Free The Baghdad Railway Club by Andrew Martin Page B

there were plenty of those. Beyond the roadway was a plantation. I walked under the trees. The dates had not been picked. Presently the trees thinned out, and I saw a railway line.
    I stood on the rail, and wondered which way to follow it. To left and right it went into more date palms and low, rocky embankments. Again, I had the swooning feeling. I was still sweating like a bull, the stuff coming off me faster than it had been before if anything. I’d been a fool to drink that water. I turned left and walked the line until the trees cleared again, and I came to a railway territory. There was the station; also an engine shed, some tracks meandering between the two with blockhouses and coal bunkers at intervals, a half-smashed hand-cranked turntable, and sidings going off, most out of commission, being buckled and broken. Had they been shelled? In the silence, I stood waiting for the flare of a Very light, the shriek of a five-nine or a whizz-bang, but that was the Western Front, and I was in the East. A different sort of death awaited here.
    It was ten o’clock; I was an hour early for Boyd. I contemplated the tracks.
    As far as I could judge, the one I’d followed here had been the one that ran up north to Samarrah and Tikrit – up towards where the Turks were. Another drifted off south-westerly, leading, as I believed, to the town of Feluja. A third – a narrow-gauge line – looked badly broken up, but I believed it led almost due south to Babylon, where the ruins were. Each would have to cut through the city walls, parts of which I could make out in the distance.
    I approached first the engine shed. Double doors stood open at front and back, revealing two tracks and one crocked engine. It was a big beast: a 2-8-0 of German manufacture, and it had a name: Elefant . But the thing couldn’t travel; its side rods were missing. In between the tracks, some bushes grew. What were they? Jasmine? Basil? I thought: the smell of them is very loud , and I considered – slowly – that ‘loud’ was the wrong word. There were also rough wooden tables, a quantity of tools and papers piled upon them. The papers were smeared with oil and written in German – they related to the engine. Beyond the shed, a hundred yards off, was a water tower made of stone with a metal tank on the top of it, and as I looked on, a giant bird of some sort came and landed on the top of this tank. I hadn’t bargained on any of this. The colour of the evening was now a dark green, and it was unnatural that such darkness could go with such heat. I turned about, and stumbled on the rocky ground, where I saw cartridge casings, left over from the fight for the city. As I began walking towards the companion building of the shed, namely the station, I thought back again to the water I’d drunk. I should not have had it. It had not been fresh. Had the fellow who’d given it me known that?
    The station was a building of rough grey stone with pointed, church-like windows and a church-like bell hanging from a little arch at one end of the pitched roof. There were two platforms and two tracks running between them. There was not enough in the station: no ticket gates, no posters on the walls, not even any nameplate saying ‘Baghdad’, and certainly no people. But between the tracks stood a Janus-faced clock on an iron stand. The clock said half after ten, so it was about right. The platforms were low, and dirty booths of glass and iron ran along the left-hand one, all in a line like compartments of a carriage: waiting rooms or ticket offices, and one must be the Salon de Thé . I recollected that I was supposed to say, ‘It is closed.’
    Well, I’d look a bloody idiot saying that. Looking again at the walls‚ I saw that the station name was indicated, in that the word ‘BAGHDAD’ had been written on the right-hand wall in tall, shaky letters of red paint. There was a nightmare quality to the work, the long thin letters seeming to be formed of dripping