In Xanadu (19 page)

'By the grace of God we will.'

'Allah is merciful.'

'Let's hope so.'

'May his blessings always be upon you.' 'And on you.. . .'

Chivvied on by Laura, we reached Sivas station a full half-hour before the scheduled departure time. I had never before travelled by Turkish railways. From my experience of Indian trains I imagined overcrowded carriages, packed aisles and hawking vendors. But as far as hard, factual information went, I had nothing more up to date than the confident prediction I had read in the 1920
Encyclopedia
of
Islam:
'A new era will dawn with the construction of the Ankara-Sivas railway, already progressing fast thanks to the work of the Kemalist Republic's government....'

As we were soon to discover, the construction of the Ankara -Sivas railway seemed to have done very little to alter anything. Despite our experiences on the overnight trip from Mersin, Turkey has always had one of the most reliable bus services in the world. As a result, the inefficient state-owned Turkish railways have never been used by anyone except those government servants who are given free tickets. At half past four, the scheduled departure time, the only other person on the platform apart from ourselves was the station master, and he was fast asleep. He was still snoring at six. At seven the light was beginning to fade and the station master was slumped forwards over a bench, snoring as before. He awoke at eight and took us off to his dimly lit office for a glass of tea. We were joined there by three soldiers at a quarter to nine. By twenty past there were eight of us packed in tightly around the station master's
demlik.
Someone produced two bottles of
raki
and one ol the soldiers tried to teach the station master and me how to play a card game, a complicated cross between bridge, snap and pontoon, Laura, sensibly, did not join in.

We played two games and the station master won them both. We drank each other's health, and played another game. It
w
as
dark in the office and we could hardly see our cards. I suspected the station master of cheating.

Time passed; the
raki
bottles emptied steadily. We cannot actually have drunk very much but the whole evening assumed that air of guilty debauchery that always hangs over Muslim drinking sessions. A
birasi
with a handful of sober Turks drinking weak Efes Pilsen can usually be made to feel as wicked as the most degenerate bordello.

A
t eleven o'clock the train had still not come. It was stuffy in the room and smoke stung the eyes. Everyone was fairly drunk. Gradually the conversation became lurid.

'I am knowing Ingliz,' said one of the soldiers. 'I am knowing dirty words.'

‘Which ones?'

The soldier paused.

'Shirt,' he whispered.

'Any others?'

Ht looked nervously around him, and brought his head closer to mine. 'Bigger.' 'That's a very dirty word indeed.'

He bit his lower lip, and the play continued in a hushed silence.

At the end of the game the station master persuaded me to play backgammon with him. Here too I suspected foul play. As he shook the dice he stared directly at me as if to distract my eyes, and he played his moves with dazzling swiftness. He moved his counters as soon as the dice settled. He never counted out his moves. I played different tactics: moving very slowly, tapping out my moves, trying desperately to find a way to double up my counters. But one was always left on its own, and it always seemed to be caught by the station master's pieces as they shot off for home on the wings of a double six. I was soon backgammoned.

Dizzy with smoke and
raki
and failure, I agreed to play another card game, some sort of Turkish strip poker. This did not go well either. I felt increasingly miserable, and when one of the soldiers knocked his glass of
raki
over me, I vented my frustration in a flash of temper.

Look, is this bloody train going to come or not?'

'Oh yes. Train he comes. No problem,' said the station master.

'When?'

'Soon.'

'How soon?'

'Soon.'

'HOW SOON?'

'Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.'

'You lose again,' said one of the soldiers, trumping my hand. 'Now, Mr William, you reveal yourself.'

'Forget the game for one second,' said Laura, creating a welcome diversion. ‘I want to know if this train is going to come.'

'Yes, exactly.'

'No you worry. Missy, Sir,' said the station master. Train he comes. Choof choof. Very fast top class train.'

He beamed proudly: People of Sivas, much they like him.' Top rate,' said the first soldier. Tut fut fut,' said his friend.

'Choof choof... first class ... whoosh whoosh’ echoed the others.

The train did come, but not for another hour. Humbled and exhausted, I followed Laura into one of the carriages.

Never have I seen a train less likely to raise the spirits. It could not have been further from an Indian carriage. There, for all the discomfort, the seats are packed with people busily unrolling bedding, setting up primuses, cooking supper and generally making themselves at home. Walking into an Indian train is like walking into an Indian village. Entering a Turkish train is like finding oneself in a solitary confinementncell. The empty carriages reminded me of the dowdy, unloved look of run-down hotel lounges in the Scottish Highlands. The plastic seats were torn, the windows would not open and there was a melancholy whiff of urine in the air.

We sat in a compartment beside a suicidal policeman returning to his posting in Erzurum after a holiday on the Aegean coast. His clothes were dirty and unwashed, and three or four days' stubble covered his face; he chain-smoked and spat on the floor. His mood reflected my own and I was wafted to sleep by a long lullaby of his woes:

'In Bodrum I went with bad womens. .. .

'Perhaps diseases 

'My wife, once she pretty woman. . ,.

'So many childrens-------

'Fat now like Bayyram sheep....'

He droned on much of the night. I would wake up, find him still talking, make a few sympathetic noises, then sink back into a slumber. By three o'clock the policeman had finally fallen asleep, but I found myself wide awake. There were no curtains on the windows and outside Turkey was juddering past. You could feel it clatter by beneath the wheels:
Truckety-truck. truckety-truck. truckety-truck.
Occasionally the train would hoot to itself but that was the only noise to break the rhythm of its heartbeat. It was a comforting, umbilical sound and I tucked myself up into an embryo position and rested my head against a folded jersey. Exhausted, befuddled by sleep and the soldiers'
raki,
anaesthetized by the smell of sour urine, I sat looking out of the window, trying to forget the snoring policeman and the grimy, ill-smelling train. In the bright moonlight the landscape seemed surprisingly fertile. There were small cottage-garden fields scattered randomly around the track, and in some of them was a sheen of flood water. At the edge of the pools
I
could see the unmistakable silhouettes of water buffaloes - the first I had seen since India - as big and leathery as tusked walruses, but sitting like kittens with their legs folded up beneath them.

This was good grazing land, the area Polo must have been

referring to when he wrote in the summer the country is frequented by the whole host of the Tartars of the Levant, because it furnishes them with such excellent pasture for their cattle'. I had read the passage in Sivas and had been struck by it: the dry flatlands there were quite unlike Polo's description, and it was difficult to imagine how those expanses of long-exhausted land could transform themselves into the pastures described in
The Travels.

A few minutes later I saw the reason for the transformation. The train rounded a long curve and found itself in a broad, high-backed, deep-cut valley. The track stood on a raised bank surrounded by a moraine of pebbles, and on one side ran a wide, fast-flowing river. Surprised, I scrabbled around in the luggage rack above the policeman, and managed to find the map without waking him. Following the railway track east from Sivas
I
located the river. Its Turkish name, the Firat Nehri, meant nothing to me. Only when I followed the thin blue line down through Syria and out towards Baghdad, did I see the river's more familiar name - the Euphrates.

I grabbed my normally monosyllabic logbook and scribbled several pages of unusually emotional, florid prose -
pace:

The Euphrates! Is there another river which carries with it so many associations? How many times have I heard the name in church and at school? The river which ran through the Garden of Eden, one of the five rivers of the Apocalypse! Following its course on the map, its banks are littered with the names of the ancient cities it once gave life to: Mari, Nippur, Uruk, Larsa, Erdu, Kish. I think of all the hours I have spent in the Assyrian gallery of the British Museum haunted by the bas-reliefs and winged bulls brought back from Nineveh by Layard; now I am looking at the river its sculptors drank from! The same river cleaned the men who built the Ziggurat of Ur, watered down the wine in the goblets at Nebuchadnezzar's feast, and irrigated the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.... Et cetera, et cetera.

Despite the excitement I seem to have fallen asleep soon after writing this, for the next entry records that I was abruptly woken by the conductor shaking me by the shoulder.