Orient Express by John Dos Passos Page B

the caravan of Hosein, sweet-bearded trusting old man, leaving Medina for Kufa on the last journey. There is no grief yet, but a sense of something circling overhead, wings of doom that plane above the dimming twilight, through the streets the drumbeat and the tramp of feet and the gruff cry of triumph, Hassan, Hosein.
    After all are these gods so dead?
    3. Malaria
    The Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford looked at the thermometer and shook his head. Then he fetched his wife, who looked at the thermometer and shook her head. The room was full of people looking at thermometers and shaking their heads; a voice travelled from an immense distance and said: Nonsense, I feel fine. The bed was strangely soft, billowy, soaring above the heads of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford and his wife and the Hôtel de France and the cries beating out of brass throats, Hosein, Hassan.
    There was a chasm. The City Without Bedbugs stood on the edge of the chasm. Insh’allah, said the Russian engineers, the city will not fall into the chasm, which is a hundred and five degrees deep. Then there arose a great prophet and he said, Ah mon ami, j’ai trouvé un poux. Avec le typhus qu’il a c’est très dangereux. Bismillah, cried the villagers. The city is going to fall into the chasm. Then spake the prophet: The City Without Bedbugs is doomed to slide into the gulf. Bismillah, cried the villagers. We must fill up the gulf or chasm. Whereupon they began throwing in their furniture and their possessions and their houses and their wives and children and lastly themselves. Intra venos, said the Sayyid rolling his eyes and shot in a tumblerful of quinine.
    Then I was lying very long and cold and brittle on the stony tundra of my bed, and the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford was explaining his plans to me in careful French. In a day or two the road would be open to Recht on the Caspian. Riza Khan was at this moment cleaning up the remnants of the Republic of Ghilan. Then we could drive the Ford to Recht, there load it with caviar that can be bought for nothing on the Caspian and drive back to Kasvin, Hamadan, Kermanshah and Baghdad, where the British would pay through the nose and buy by the grain what we had bought by the kilo. The only thing that stood between us and riches was a few hundred pounds capital to buy gasoline with. Now if I spent the sum I would eventually spend on the fare to Baghdad on gasoline and caviar, we would all get to Baghdad for nothing and have a substantial profit when we got there.
    â€”But do you really own this voiture Ford?—Virtually. It’s as good as mine.
    Outside the wind howled and shrieked about the house. You couldn’t see the courtyard for dust. Dust seeped into the room through every crevice. There was a half an inch coating of fine white dust on my pillow. The ramshackle building of the Hôtel de France shook and rattled as if it were coming down about our ears. At last the din grew so terrific that I couldn’t hear the suave voice of the Russian engineer who said he owned a Ford.
    There was a ripping crash and a shriek from somewhere in the hotel. The Russian engineer ran out and came back in a jiffy with his wife in his arms. Her hair hung snakily over her face and she was chirruping excitedly in Russian. The end of the roof over their room had blown off. It was a tin roof and waved in the wind with a sound like stage thunder. Surely the whole house would be down before night. I lay in the bed with the sheet over my nose to keep out the dust, and the sheet over my ears to keep out the noise, feeling very long and cold and weak and tired, and slid effortlessly into sleep like a trunk going down a chute.
    4. Baha’i
    The three American women were Baha’i Missionaries, one from New York, one from Chicago and the youngest one perhaps from some small town in the Dakotas. They all had the same eyes, spread, unblinking, with dilated pupils. We