The Baghdad Railway Club(53)

Stevens, closing the fire door, did something unusual for him. He asked a question of his own:

‘Why does the river flood, sir?’

‘The ice melts,’ said Shepherd.

‘Oh,’ said Stevens. But after a while, he was forced to ask another question: ‘What ice?’

‘In the Anatolian Mountains.’

Stevens made do with that, and I knew that I would have to make do with what Shepherd had told me of his Turkish interest.

The spot called Istabulat came up – a tiny, perfect fort – and finally Samarrah station and its small garrison of Tommies and sepoys. I saw a radio car in a ring of palms, horses under a canopy, and proper sidings with a quantity of rolling stock, mostly of English breed (half of it marked ‘Gloucester Carriage and Wagon Co.’); also one tank engine – an 0-6-0 goods loco of the London and South Western Railway, but its brown paint was covered in thousands of tiny scratches, as though someone had tried to scribble it out. Perhaps it wasn’t fit to be sent north, and that’s why we were going. It did seem that working engines were at a premium hereabouts. As I looked on, a corporal passed me up a bottle of something that turned out to be lime cordial. He said, ‘If summer has its delights, it also has its dangers, right sir?’ It was a slogan for some kind of skin cream, remembered from Blighty. I must have looked a fright. I pointed to the engine.

‘Does she go?’ I asked, and the corporal shook his head. ‘Not on your life, sir. Sand in the motions.’ His accent – Birmingham sort of way – clashed with the brownness of his skin.

Shepherd stood on what would have been the platform of Samarrah station, if it had had a platform. He was handing some papers over to a captain of the Royal Engineers – details of our run. There was a good deal of official toing and froing, and we were stopped for over an hour. Eventually, we took on water for the engine, and a parcel of hard biscuits and bully beef. The grub was to be consumed immediately, wouldn’t last a minute in the sun. As we pulled away from the station, we had a view of the town beyond. It was the usual low brick boxes, but with two features out of the common: the first was a structure resembling a giant wedding cake. I had heard of this: the Great Mosque. Another had a golden dome. ‘The Al-Askari Mosque,’ said Shepherd. ‘Ninth-century.’ It looked like the sun, fallen from the sky.

Three-quarters of an hour later, I noticed Stevens pulling faces. He was standing foursquare in front of the fire door and twisting his head in all directions, which involved a fearful rolling of the eyes. When he saw me watching him, he left off, only to commence with another sort of ‘exercise’ involving a violent bulging of his socks. Then he stopped doing that, and began looking left, towards the bare and barren plain.

‘Boats,’ he said, in a toneless and uninterested sort of voice.

I scrambled over to his side and looked forwards, and there were boats – six of them, upside down on flat wagons parked in a siding a hundred yards off.

Shepherd was laughing. ‘I’ve been looking out on the other side,’ he said. ‘Pull up will you, Jim?’

I applied the brakes. Jumping down, Shepherd said, ‘It might be a trap,’ and set off eagerly towards the boats.

He’s like a jockey, I thought: small, trim, somewhat bow-legged. He carried his rifle and haversack, and wore no hat. But he had a length of white cloth around his neck, which he now caught up, and wound about his head while walking. A keffiyah. I worked the injector, since the water was low in the gauge, not that Stevens had mentioned the fact. He was sitting on the sandbox and eyeing me, with his back to his master.

When I next looked towards Shepherd, he was small in the distance, climbing on to the last of the flat-bed wagons, inspecting the launch tethered on to it, then the bogies beneath. The giant sun hovered about three feet over his head. It was finally taking its bow after another spectacular performance. I could vaguely make out white lettering painted on the side of the launches. It was Turkish Arabic, but the characters looked like a series of numbers, and I thought of the pleasure boats on the River Nidd at Knaresborough. When your number was called out from the boathouse, you had to return your boat – a shaming moment somehow, tantamount to an accusation of theft. I could almost hear the swishing of the river as it ran fast between the pillars of the railway bridge; I thought of the penny licks that Harry and Sylvia would always insist on having when we returned the boat – compensation for giving it up. I was going far away, levitating out of the desert. I brought myself back to reality by running my finger over my cracked lips. I licked them, and they were dry again in an instant. It seemed to me in fact that they’d been dry before I’d finished licking them. I glanced towards Shepherd, just as he was leaping down from the wagon. I believed he’d given up on the launches; their motors would be clogged with sand, just as the tank engine at Samarrah had been. In other words, there’d be no point us reversing along the siding, hooking up to them, and taking them back. I hoped not anyhow, for I lacked the energy to do anything but keep The Elephant rolling forwards on its present track.