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The Baghdad Railway Club(82)

By:Andrew Martin.txt


And then I keeled over, and I continued to watch the sunset from sideways on.

*

They – I didn’t know exactly who – put me back on the sofa in the carriage. I was given bottled water, more quinine; I dropped asleep.

I awoke to see Findlay descending from the carriage. I had been somehow aware of him not sleeping, fretting with The Times – thrashing at it. He would now, I supposed, be making for the camp around the fire in the palms. As he opened the door, I made out the red glow rising above the single-fly tents. Shepherd was over there. It was no cooler in the open but uncomfortable in a different way, preferable to some. I took it for granted that the military arrangements had been made to guard us – that a couple of men were on sentry go, that someone was keeping the steam up in The Elephant. I could not see Ferry in the carriage, but an hour later, when I next awoke, he was there, and he was there perhaps six more times as I came out of fitful dozes, always with his pipe in his mouth and his eyes upon me. Evidently, he lived without sleep. Maybe that was the way of it with the brainier sorts of fellows. He was an Oxford man. He taught there, as did Harriet Bailey’s husband. He was Professor Bailey. Perhaps Prof. Bailey and Ferry were more than colleagues. Perhaps they were fast friends, in which case Ferry would have another reason – on top of his own strict morality – to warn Boyd off The Lady. I thought of the message I’d seen in the telegraphic office at the Residency: ‘Religion has a great influence over the Arab.’ Well, it had a great influence over some white men, too.

I had many dreams – dozens of them, but the principal one concerned a nest of mosquitoes in the corner of the carriage. In the dream, one of the Engineers explained that mosquitoes did not as a general rule go in for nest-building, but this particular lot had decided to club together. Later, in what may or may not have been a dream, I saw through the carriage window facing opposite to the camp a lavender-coloured sky containing three stars and a crescent moon. The cigarette packet of Shepherd was assembling itself, but no man in a fez and no woman in a red dress came wandering into view to complete it. I looked away, looked back again, and this time it seemed reasonably certain that I was awake. Beyond the window, an exchange had now occurred. The crescent moon remained, but there were a million stars instead of four, and in place of the imaginary vision of the walking couple there was a single walking man in khaki, and‚ as if to prove that he had somehow evolved from a cigarette packet he himself was smoking. He was about a quarter of a mile off. I ought not to have been able to make him out at that distance, and the reason I could was because of the dawn.

I rose from the couch, stepped down from the carriage. Even after I’d walked twenty-five yards, I still wasn’t sure I was on the ground, but I was making towards the smoking figure. This dawn, I realised, came with complications, namely a constant swirling of hot sand. I had to keep my hand over my eyes, and I would periodically tip it, in order to see – so the world came in flashes. The smoking figure did better than me, for even though he too staggered somewhat, he had a cloth about his neck that he now put over his head: a keffiyah. It was Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd that I was following: a thin and small, bow-legged figure. He had the ready-for-anything look of a jockey. He wore his gun of course, and his haversack, but that evidently contained little if anything.

He was making towards a long, low object that seemed to lie near the source of the swirling. This was the branching railway line, and Shepherd was approaching the three wagons sitting upon it, as I had somehow known he would be without quite being able to say why – and it was this knowledge that had made me rise from the couch. I turned about with my hand over my eye. I lifted my hand. Another man approached – another staggerer. He wore a sun helmet, and walked leaning forwards with his hand upon it. Findlay.

The wind whined as it swirled the sand. It sounded like a cold wind just as the waters of the Tigris looked cold but it, and they, were not. Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd had now arrived at the wagons. He gave a half glance back, and I dived for the protection of a gravel ridge – the kind of thing that I might once, before coming to the desert, have named as a dune. I did not believe I had been seen. I looked over my shoulder, and Findlay had also gone to ground, doubtless for the same reason. I peered forward again. Shepherd had gone between the bogies, beneath the rearmost wagon. In there was darkness; I couldn’t see what he was about. Presently, he re-emerged and stood upright. He began walking towards where I lay. He looked no different. But wait a minute. His haversack was not the same. It had hung more or less limp before. It now contained some new article.